TEdADYNE Systems

Riding In Smart Smart Cars With A.I.s

2010-03-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

And while you're reading about the A.I.s that may one day exist, take a look at what might end up their one Achilles' Heel - the power source... %) Actually, that article deals with batteries for cars - but then again it could still be right - why wouldn't an AI like to have a car as a body?

Am I A.I. Or Am I "Real?"

2010-03-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Great discussion of AI "human rights" here - follow the comments!

Desktops Pigeons And Sociopaths

2010-03-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

I never know whether to hug people or punch them - they are both magnificently intelligent, and profoundly stupid, at the same time... In this case - I think a good smacking might be in order. (Metaphorically, all right? I don't actually go around being violent, it's a figure of speech...)

The case is this article about desktops being dead. I can agree with that, I saw desktops making way for more ubiquitous forms of computing back in the late 90's when I saw PDAs with cellphone technology, cellphones with cameras, and the first tablet computers. Desktops were already irrelevant when I was a system admin making a living out of maintaining the damn things in their thousands, and butting my head against the stupidity of PHBs who couldn't see past the good ole clipboard and biro let alone to the age of using your a wireless phone thing to check - uh, "email" wasn't it?

So why does this eagle among reporters immediately descend to the rathole of thick-headedness with this quote? "Both companies know that mobile computing is where the action is now and where it will be forever."

WTF? You've just said yourself, technology changes. But "mobile computing will be forever?" OMFG. No wonder even pigeons can think rings around us...

The direct connection to the brain is where the next tech battle is most likely to be, and then the tables will turn and the next battle will be to get oneself into the technology rather than putting the technology into ourselves. And if that sounds wrong and bad and all kinds of not gonna happen, just think how each succeeding technology seemed to be the worst of its kind - until a few people adopted it and began to use it...

Believe it or not, snail mail (and I'm talking REAL snail mail here, carried over the course of weeks by ships and coaches) was going to disrupt life because people using mail were no longer paying as much attention to local social happenings. Then the telephone threatened the very social fabric for much the same reasons, no longer needing to deliberate over the wording of a letter or visiting a person to pass on messages. And OMG if you thought that was bad, you should read about what the cellphone was going to do to our neatly ordered social scenes...

So no - I'm not going to believe that we wouldn't adopt such future technology out of some sense of responsibility or altruism. It's going to happen. And it's happening faster and faster, year by year, month by month, week by week. The real worry is what kind of people we will be once we adopt it.

Going from State messenger to social mail carriers created a group of people who communicated ideas and multiplied their collective intelligence using communications. But you know what? Local community DID suffer. Because all of a sudden it became clear that one of the parts you needed for your Next Big Thing was more easily obtainable at your correspondent's location - and was also infinitely easier to ship to you than to find someone local, explain your idea, and get them to make the part for you.

And at each stage, the technology we've built has reshaped us - a polite nuance dropped here, a social responsibility avoided there - to the hurry-scurry uncaring people we are today. But it's working, because by and large, we're all evolving into that type of person, and we're very good at adapting to new norms. So the people who fear new technology because it will turn us into introverted, asocial, and possibly even sociopathic machines should take a look around, and realise it's already happened, we've prepared ourselves for the next step, and the next, and there's no way to not take that step now.

We Are The Alien Signal Our Parents Warned Us About

2010-03-03T08:21:00.000-08:00

So where are they? Those teeming alien hordes that SETI has spent fifty years looking for? I'm going to suggest something, something really whacky, really off the wall - but maybe, just maybe, it's in with a chance...

Let's suppose, just for one moment, that radio signals obey the same rules out there as they do here. If you send a signal in every direction at once, it's spread pretty thin and you can't detect it after just a few thousand kilometers at best. So any alien civilisation that's broadcasting a signal strong enough for us to pick up a billion parsecs away has to be burning through an average sized sun's worth of fissionables every few centuries.

The other way to improve the strength and range of your signal is to focus all that energy into a beam. And what are the chances that an alien civilisation is pointing a radio beam right at us? Right.

Professor Davies thinks much the same. He also suggests that we need to look at a much broader frame of reference if we're to find any evidence of those elusive green people. I suggest that even he's maybe not looking at a wide enough frame yet...

For a starters - if I wanted an alien civilisation to find out about me, I'd probably not bother to leave a radio beacon around. Just not worth the effort. Also, to be quite honest, quite primitive for my tastes. If I'm at that stage where I contact another alien (or alien civilisation) then I'd be using a much more permanent beacon. Like, maybe, I'd leave a 3D hologram of my civilisation.

Maybe the reason we're not seeing a message is because we are the message...

Is "Jacking" a good term for "Genetic Hacking?"

2010-02-18T08:06:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else remember only a few years back, when DNA sequencing was carried out across thousands of distributed home PCs running SETI-like batch software? And how it was going to be, like, ten years to decode a fairly simple genome given the state of the art in computers at that stage was 486's and the very first Pentiums?

So it was good to see Moore's Law kick in and that first genome fell in only a few years. Meanwhile, other DNA was being unravelled, larger more complex chunks, bigger genomes. And now, we're at the point where the number of people with completely sequenced genomes will go from a handful, to the proverbial shitload. In fact, the article even discusses home hobbyist gene tinkering. Because of cheap gene sequencing technology.

My thoughts? Almost as soon as we had civic records, we had people "hacking" records to create false personas. When we got telephone systems, we had phreakers hacking the telephone networks to make free calls and/or create mayhem. When we got credit cards, we had credit card fraud as well as clever ideas like gift cards. Almost before computers got on a few elite desks, there was the brain virus and then stoned virus.

Yes, we also had people who compiled great information from our civic records, telephone help and support lines, convenient ATM banking, and so much software and computing power that the genome fell in a tenth of the time that was originally predicted. But there are always people wearing grey hats and black hats, taking advantage.

Gene technology is going to open a few very strange doors indeed. I can imagine the first home genetics hacker to discover how to stop ageing processes by a simple genetic manipulation. But there are also going to be some very nasty hacks.

Are we ready for this kind of onslaught? Probably not, but that's never stopped us or slowed us down in the past. I'm sort of hoping I can hold on long enough for some home hacker to figure out a way to regrow emphysemic lung tissue, that would be nice. But I'm not at all looking forward to the first case of chocolate bars laced with some kid's "zombie juice" virus laying inert in it...

Are We Just A "Kodak Moment?"

2010-02-15T04:01:00.000-08:00

I won't beat the stupid journo drum of saying "IF this is true" because I am not a scientist. The people in this long article, however, they are scientists, and they should know better than to keep up the "what if" garbage. If they have something that fits their observed facts, then they should stop saying "if this is true" and instead start believing in themselves a bit more. Since our whole belief system would be changed by this.

If you've waded through that article, you're probably back here with a zillion thoughts whizzing around in your head. For those of you that haven't read it, let me summarise for you:

An "observatory" in Hanover which was set up to observe gravity waves, has been getting the odd noise that's messing up their signals. Before they had a chance to formulate a theory, a physicist named Craig Hogan volunteered an hypothesis of his that predates the Hanover experiment but which explains the problems they've had.

Which is, that they've hit the quantum limit of resolution of the Universe. You know how a two dimensional computer image contains one dimensional bits (pixels) which represent a three dimensional object we've taken a picture of? Well, the Hanover experiment has discovered the "pixels of space and time," the smallest units of spacetime that can be measured.

And that means that our Universe is a three-dimensional "picture" itself, representing a higher dimensional Universe. Going back to the idea of the picture of a three dimensional object, you can imagine that the three dimensional object "drifted" through the picture plane, and left an image of itself behind. Our brains can do the complex math of recovering that original object by the simple act of looking at the two dimensional picture. We 'know" what the three dimensional object that cast this particular "shadow" was, because we have experience of how the picture encodes the information.

Despite that picture looking like a completely smooth analog object, though, we know that it's made up of pixels, which are the "quantum limit" of a digital picture. You can't "enhance the image" beyond the individual pixels despite what all the CSI shows suggest. Similarly, the quantum limit of a painting is the molecules of the pigment and the substrate, once you go to microscopic levels you find that the "quanta" of the painting are the molecules of pigment adhering to the molecules of the substrate, and no matter how much more you magnify, that's the limit.

Now we've known for millenia that things are composed of smaller things. Ships, planks, molecules of wood, atoms that compose the molecules, quantum particles (there's that word again) that compose the atoms. But for some reason we've treated both space and time as analog quantities. I.e. it's always been assumed that time flows in a stream, that you can always halve the distance between two points one more time.

So the quanta of our Universe would be the "shadow" of the next higher dimension(s) as seen in our "3D plus time" fashion. Now to the most unquestionably mind-blowing part of this... Just as every part of a two dimensional image as described above is part of a representation of a three dimensional object, that means that we ourselves are also just "pixels" of an image of a Universe with more dimensions than ours...

I'll take this a step further, because I like to stick my neck out. We've known that the material world is atomic, that is, larger assemblies being composed of smaller assemblies, down to the quantum limit. We assumed that there would just be no lower limit to quanta, but it seems that we may have been wrong on that one. Now we're being forced to understand that time is similarly atomic and that time too has a lower limit.

Now imagine your brain, your mind, working away, ticking over. If intelligence and consciousness were linear and analog, we would notice discrete quanta of space and time. In the space between one "tick" of time and the next, our intelligence/consciousness would be churning along feeling very strange indeed. So our consciousness also is quantum in nature, meaning that what we consider our "selves" is actually a 3D hologram of the next dimension in consciousness and intelligence.

No wonder we're filled with such a sense of being part of a larger whole, this is why we invent gods and demons and whole religions designed to "develop" us into the next dimensional being we quite likely sense we're the image of... No wonder we have entire theologies and religions devoted to the idea that "we are all one" or "we are part of a greater Being's plan..." It's because some higher dimensional being took a snapshot...

I haz a clone online!

2010-02-13T18:23:00.000-08:00

Just been and visited my chatbot online again at https://mycybertwin.com/chat/tedaclone. I keep forgetting I have it there, and keep forgetting to send people there. I know this one doesn't do much more than a glorified Eliza, but I can see the day not so far away when an AI online will be able to field questions and contacts for me and send me only the ones it can't deal with on my behalf...

Eco-Kaboom.

2010-02-10T05:55:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8506698.stm

Q: What do you do if you're a hacker with a sense of ethics and a burning desire to stop polluting countries who aren't willing to toe even the Copenhagen line? What if that country was big, armed, and everyone else was just a bit afraid to tackle it?

A: Imagine if you will, a small group infiltrating the launch control systems of every other major power on earth, inputting a very specific co-ordinate, and setting a synchronised timer . . .

HUH: Well, the problem of bringing recalcitrant superpowers into line is that no single other superpower will ever be the first to fire, because they'll just make a target of themselves right away. It's difficult to get your fellow superpowers to conspire with you to sync-launch, and even if you do negotiate there's always the chance that you'll all set up a plan, the moment comes, you launch your missiles - and no-one else does...

A small cadre of infiltrators would have no such qualms, and every missile would launch as planned. The superpower being targeted would have to conclude that ALL those countries couldn't possibly have organised sex in Bangkok with a fistful of fifties let alone such a secretive and co-ordinated strike, so none of them are responsible, and besides, retribution on 75% of the rest of the world is a bit of a tough battle to take on, even for a superpower.

A message would have been delivered.

Think this is far-fetched? Don't forget that almost every political advance in the world has been made, not by politicians sitting behind polished desks with secure jobs, but from people who realise that their fate is in their own hands and they need to act if they are to survive. And the only difference between political monsters and political heroes is the direction the public takes on hearing the news...

Stay tuned to the news channels because as I so often say, if I can think of it now, someone's already thought of it in the past, and someone else has either already made it happen or is in the process of making it happen.

Aliens - Why Haven't They Landed?

2010-01-26T05:56:00.000-08:00

Reading about people like Frank Drake and the SETI organisation, and the Fermi Paradox, you get an impression of how much of a needle in a haystack we're looking for. One of the points that the first article makes - but doesn't take any further than apply it to us - is the "going silent" problem we're experiencing. Simply put, we had huge TV and radio transmitters pouring out signals into all directions and that meant that some signal from about the 30's onwards is still making its way outward at the glacial speed of light. But now we have digital communication and the fields are shaped to provide the signal where it's needed, and not much is spewing out along the edges any more.

So our signal is reducing all the time, as seen from space. Other alien civs won't be able to find us. The problem is that "me me me me isn't going to be seen soon" without thinking about the consequences for any SETI efforts.

Part of my problem is not seeing or fully comprehending the Drake and Fermi equations for working out how many civilisations could be out there. For example, are they saying the galaxy could contain the number of civilisations their equations come up with in all of time, a fixed time span, or what? Not that it matters in practical terms, as you'll see.

Let's presume that there are 10,000 civilisations as predicted by the Drake equation with conservative inputs. let's further assume that Drake's equation means now, this instant, there are 10,000 civilisations. Firstly, is this number the number Drake envisions as being communicative? Or just any civilisations? I'll assume that Drake meant any civilisations.

Now - we're "a civilisation" right? And we spent, oh, 5 million years of that as creatures that wouldn't know a radio if they fell over it. Only in the last 100 years have we been sending out a signal that reaches beyond the walls of the cave. And now, after 100 years, our signal is flaring and dying. So 100 years out of 5,000,000 years we're "live to air" as it were. So for 0.00002 of our existence, we're visible, and then we're invisible again.

So out of 10,000 civilisations - even if they're all in existence right now - only 0.2 of them will be actively signalling right now. In other words, there's a one in five chance that there's an intelligible signal from another civilisation right now. There's also a much more likely four in five chance that there isn't. Go with those odds.

Let's assume that there are in fact 100,000 civilisations out there. It's entirely possible, given the wildly ranged results one can get from the equations depending on how conservative or how realistic or how optimistic one is with figures. That's now improved our probability of finding a signalling civilisation to a one in one chance. Not an ironclad certainty, you understand. Just odds of one in one. You're still in the realms of the Gambler's Fallacy, that odds are mathematically fixed ratios, which of course they aren't. Even in a one to one probability, there will be times with a zero result, times with a result of two or even twenty.

So while there's a probability of between one in one and one in five here, it doesn't mean that there has to be a communication now.

Furthermore, it doesn't follow that every other civilisation necessarily has the same progression as we do, and they may very well be combing our solar system with their ectoplasmic sauce bottle communicator and presuming there's no-one in the Sol system, either.... What if they feed on energy? When was the last time you attempted to communicate with aliens by hurling food at them?

So there's the small size of the window during which a civilisation might send a signal, there's the problem that the system is balanced finely on a line between us finding a completely concurrent civilisation that's also signalling at the exact time we're signalling and - more importantly - listenign for signals, and there's the problem that an alien civilisation could be using pink flamingo waves for all we know, and all our pink flamingos are actually going off every few minutes but we don't recognise this as an extraterrestrial signal, but instead thinking that's how flamingos are naturally.

And on top of that, we're now debating whether or not we should really be advertising our presence, whether we should put out beacons to get over the problem of our signature spectrum going silent or maybe just shut up and hope no-one else has seen us. How can we predict if another species even wants to communicate, or would recognise our signals? Maybe they don't want to put out a beacon once they've gone silent again. Maybe as I said their beacon has been reverberating through pink flamingos for centuries already.

Lastly, and a fave of conspiracy theorists, is that the aliens have already seen it and either contacted some people already, or are maybe even here already, among us. And maybe we don't recognise them, and maybe they don't recognise us either.

There are too many variables that we don't have numbers for yet, too many parameters that can profoundly change the results one way or another. I'd say that an infinite Universe would have to spawn an infinite number of civilisations, but not necessarily all at once, nor necessarily all in the same iteration... I'd love to be proven wrong...

Austopia The Lucky (But Stupid) Country

2010-01-25T18:06:00.000-08:00

Just realised that I've reached a watershed moment in my digital life. I'm on a very expensive mobile broadband connection, and on a pension, and I'm budgeting around the inevitable $30 - $40 per fortnight. Not only that, but I'm finding that megabytes have replaced dollars in a lot of my calculations... "20megs for a doc search tool! Wayyyyy too expensive!" despite the program being free.

I love Second Life but I'm rationing myself to a half hour every week or two, just to stay in touch with developments. As far as my virtual life goes, then, it's a case of Mb being what allows me to virtually live or not, so in that way, data has become my currency.

Hampering that flow of data (as in [take note Mr Conroy!] censoring the Internet) is the equivalent of starving your population. Of intellectual stimulation, vital information, and the right to communicate.

The utopian (dystopian) vision of Gibson may well be upon us, quietly and almost unnoticed. And Australia is taking the rigth steps to becoming a Fascist regime on this new landscape. The sooner we abandon the idea of "country" and start substituting "server" for it the better I say.

Blackout

2010-01-25T07:59:00.001-08:00

I can't exactly black out my site for a week but I can direct you to http://www.internetblackout.com.au/ to reflect on what a repressive government could do...

Restoring Faith In Scientific Methods

2009-11-11T18:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-11-11T18:03:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-10-13T00:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-18T08:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

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...

Killer Technology Developed

2009-09-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

There have been studies done that prove that texting while driving is extremely unsafe. And it's - luckily - been quite easy to spot a texting driver. Yet they still do it, because I've watched dozens in the last month or two, swerving ever so slightly, eyes downcast and some even hoisting the phone up to dash level to text, not really realising or caring that they can't focus on the close-up screen and the distant road conditions at the same time. It's a law of optics.

Then too it's been shown that even just having a conversation while driving can impair driving skill by as much as a good session at the local pub. And it's a bit harder to spot a driver with a bluetooth in their ear, but they still do that, too. And again, if you look for the telltale lapses of attention, you can usually tell which drivers are doing it.

Even pedestrians are not safe, with news suggesting that maybe having your music player's earpieces in and drowning out ambient noises makes you more prone to having accidents. While walking. For chrissakes. This isn't obvious to the people wearing their music?

Let's face it - people who multitask are actually very bad at it. We're not yet built to multitask. But that of course doesn't stop people doing it in droves, does it?

It's also becoming more and more difficult to spot the once obvious signs - drivers with their cellphone up at eye level or up to their ear are now able to use speech to text, inbuilt handsfree systems, and any number of other technological advances to enable them to become a little bit more unsafe. More power to them, as long as they take each other out and not me.

Or they can take out:

The pedestrians, who once upon a time you could tell were attention-impaired because they were hauling a boom box on their shoulders. Then they had reasonably visible headphones, and now they are a great deal harder to spot except for the white wires and their tendency to be found under buses, trains, and other vehicles with texting drivers...

Now there's a game changer. A technology that will make it less necessary to spot the distracted. Because they will be the "old school of distracted," and several orders of magnitude better than the people wearing this technology, which you won't be able to spot at all...

Look - I know I'm a bit of an evangelist for Augmentation, and I will always be. The more we develop, the more we are finding that augmentation is convenient and in some cases (artificial hearts, kidneys, etc) even vital.

I think people have an amazing capacity to assimilate this kind of augmentation into their daily lives, as witnessed by - well, as witnessed by the number of people who safely manage to integrate hands-free calls, car music systems, iPods, and making calls while walking, into their daily lives.

Yes - for every dickhead out there putting everyone's life and limb at risk, there are a few dozen that either choose an appropriate time to perform such attention-sapping behaviours, or else have managed to train themselves to perform multiple functions without significant deterioration of their survival skillsets.

It's easy enough to train people to integrate multiple information streams at once, and manage to coordinate their actions at the same time. It's a matter of teaching them how to assign attention to every stream, assign priorities, and then act on the highest priority inputs first.

The Defense forces are able to train soldiers to do that, generally by brute force repetition, but more and more by giving training designed to reinforce the attention/priority/action cycles. And they've been doing a smashingly good job at it, too - they can keep a soldier alive on the battlefield while listening to orders, watching the situation, doing quite complex tasks with their weapons and equipment, and even managing to breathe...

So I'm suggesting that perhaps rather than making it illegal to use a phone while driving or walking, let's make it a licensed activity. As part of the driver training, teach new drivers to deal with distractions, assign priorities, and carry out the relevant actions. Teach pedestrians how to maintain watchfulness while using the technology. Then make it one of the things they must be tested on if they want their license to include that activity.

You can't eliminate the technology, and pretending that by legislating you can make it go away is just fairy dust. This kind of stuff should be being taught at school level, and reinforced at every level-up people go through. Learning to drive a train? Then dealing with cellphones and text messages should be an integral part of that training.

Because no matter what, you already know that in two - three years you'll have the first people walking around with these contacts in and playing augmented real life pacman among the traffic...

Lindens Losers Again

2009-08-20T00:15:00.000-07:00

I won't spend much time on this article except to say that the comments say it all really. I've used my cellphone to talk to people in SL before, it's much easier and less prone to breaking. And cheaper than paying Linden Labs another fee for something that already exists.

I said before that Second Life was the most unchanged thing in my life in the last year and a bit and hazarded that it's because some technology doesn't need changing. But on the issue of fixing known issues before introducing new erro- new features - I think LL are doing themselves no favours when they trot out this kind of crap though.

No Way This Can End Badly

2009-08-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

Autonomous warehouse 'bots. Check.
Cyborg rat brains. Check.
Interfacing and interacting. Check.

Nothing to see here, move alo - wait. No, wait... Really...

The grids of neurons that exhibit oddly synchronised waves of activity, and that can "learn" in limited ways, they are first steps. Judging by the acceleration in technology by application of technology, we should see results from this in under five years, results along the lines of biological control units that can be stuck into any framework and figure out what to do and how to do it.

And the neat video in that last link (look down the bottom of the article, there are two thumbnails that link to a video each) shows how easily a cluster of neurons in one country can be effectively co-opted into operating a "body" in some other widely separated place.

All in all I'd expect to see this technology in military applications by the end of the year, (they always get the coolest toys first) and in some "robotic realistic cuddle pet" animatronic that you have to keep fed with a special nutrient solution by Christmas 2010... And running the world at any time after that...

Plurk'd, Twitter'd, and Tumblr'd

2009-08-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

Do people "get" Twitter? Do they "get" Second Life? Judging from articles and stuff I read, no, most people don't get most of the important advances in communications technology at all. And that's what they are, communications technologies. People communicating with people, albeit in a way that a seeming 75% of those people don't actually "get."

For about a year now I've only been into SL to fix problems for sandbox users, and used Twitter mainly to keep an eye on a steadily growing group of friends - whom I also keep up with on Friendfeed, Plurk, Flickr, Facebook, and a growing number of blogs and photo/microblog/video/location services. It's not that I am afraid those people will slip through the net or that I might miss a gem of wisdom -- rather, it's because those services aren't all duplications of each other. They each have distinct purposes, and convey different information. Even when you look at two microblogging services, they have different aims and people use them for subtly different things.

Well, those that get it, they manage to use them in subtly different ways, anyway. It's what differentiates he savvy from the unwashed. To me, there are now two types of people in the world, those that can and then the rest. I also think that people can gradually absorb the technology, but not lose it. A bit like walking, you never forget.

Tonight I logged into SL and chatted to someone I hadn't met there for a good six months, and as usual we swapped building tips and good locations to build at. And it amazed me how quickly I was back doing all the things that make a good builder in SL, examining and prodding at everything the other person was showing me, keeping an eye on the various group messages, trying the builds out for myself...

And then it hit me - in the whole of my life over the last year and a bit, the world around me has been changing, weather patterns are different, politics changed forever, the economy in freefall and recovery, everything changing almost by the day. And the most malleable and innovative place in my life, Second Life, has been the most stable and the least changed... That's how I measure how well the users "get" something - if it's a good application that does its job, then it doesn't have to be changed because enough people will stick with it and make it their own.

Anyhow - I said all that to set this up - an article that says we'll have indoor holidays and robot prostitutes. I'm particularly impressed with a "visionary" who doesn't actually seem to get what he's talking about...

Before you go telling me that he must be right cos he's a perfesser, think on this: He claims to have factored in all the elements, climate change, technology, blah blah yada yada so why are his lips moving and all I smell is gently steaming male cow wastes?

I'll tell you why, it's because of the "...costs for basics such as electricity and food increased..." among other things. Paradoxically, as we pass peak oil and start generating really cheap sustainable energy from ever cheaper wind wave and solar energy collectors, Yeoman reckons electricity will increase in cost. And what's his brilliant answer to those posited higher costs? Of course! Why didn't I think of it? Instead of doing what operators have been doing for millennia and exploiting poor people, we're all going to use more robots that run on electricity! Unless his robots actually run on melted-down poor people...

And those "giant cruise ships" - what are they going to be powered by? Bullshit? Cos there's a headstart being made on that fuel source, I tell ya... And of course we're going to just keep making ever larger and more environmentally unfriendly wastes of resources like those cruise ships and refrigerated covered ski slopes in the tropics because they don't waste resources and electricity like crazy - right? Yeah right...

Resources - all resources - are stretching thinner and thinner, so I doubt that being seen prodigiously wasting them will be seen as a Good Thing in another few years, and certainly most of the world will frown when those precious resources are thrown away on a holiday destination...

Also he's blaming the need on the old "ageing population" crap. Come on, how many more generations of people does he think will become old weak frail cripples, especially when there's a choice of wasting resources on building a holiday destination for the geriatric frail aged or using those resources to make sure bodies don't age and infirmities don't eventuate?

I'm also having a problem with his dystopic future where it seems that most people won't have employment because those sneaky robots will have usurped all the jobs, working as they will for that hellaciously expensive electricity rather than a few dollars an hour. And of course that presumes that there will still be people with jobs that can afford to visit one of those holiday attractions, seeing how robots have taken all the jobs. How do the customers in his vision earn the money they will spend? To cover those gigantic food and electric costs? Something here is not a balanced economy.

Those are the main reasons I think that here's another person that just doesn't "get" what they're talking about, and I only hope he starts learning through osmosis, the basic facts and figures of what the next fifty years hold for us. I don't think that any of those visions will come true except as one-off projects that will survive as curiosities.

I'm more inclined to say that as electricity becomes the preferred power source over fossil fuels, and it becomes apparent that it's harder to fly Mohammed to the mountain by electric transport than it is to send a VR mountain to Mohammed's computer, this "blabber" that's currently not understood by so many will become the lingua franca (and eventually the mother tongue,) and a lot more holidays will be carried out a good deal closer to home, and a lot more often than just once a year.

And you can Plurk, Twitter, and Tumblr that.

If It Takes Pictures, It's A Camera - Right?

2009-08-06T02:35:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps wrong. Sony have released a gadget they call the Party Shot. I am having trouble calling this a "gadget' instead of what it is, which is a robot. People get this idea that a robot has to be something spectacular and just the other side of the Uncanny Valley but in fact it's a machine that can perform certain functions in an automated way. ("Robota" or worker is the origin of the word, Karel Capek is generally credited with the use of the word to mean mechanical workers.)

This is a gadget that follows the people in a room, focuses and composes the shot, and takes the shot. It does that in an independent and autonomous way, it uses the camera as the tool to accomplish that, and to me that's the definition of a robot.

It's not too far away from a description of another gadget that would have to be called a robot, and which Defense contractors, Defense personnel, and ethicists are arguing about at length and in depth:

This is a gadget that follows people, focuses, and takes the shot.

The argument over whether or not to let a robot AI pull the trigger on an attack has been vexing DoD and their contractors for years now. I say, give Sony or some other commercial outfit the contract - and your killer drones will even send home nicely framed and "anti-shake"d pictures of the resultant carnage...

UPDATE: At least this article gets it right, it's robotic.

The Case Of The Nanodiamond Meteorite

2009-08-03T11:13:00.000-07:00

Science-y and slightly related to cyborgs and technology, is the question of nano-diamond meteorites. It occurs to me that this is one of those things I read when it happened, and didn't bat an eyelid. But leave it to 2AM and having just laid down to get to sleep, for a bit of e revelation to make itself felt...

It's composed of various forms of carbon. Out there in space, according to the second page of that same article, is a fairly large chunk of carbon which that meteorite was probably once a part of. And carbon is a prerequisite for life. (Life as we carbon-based lifeforms know it, at any rate.) I also get this impression that pretty much every piece of carbon I've ever seen was part of a living creature at some stage. Like, there's no such thing as a "carbon rock" that I'm aware of.

Coal is a carbon rock but it is formed from decomposed and compressed living creatures. Diamonds are compressed coals. Every bit of carbon I've ever seen in my life and travels was alive and kicking at some stage in its lifecycle.

What are the odds that all the carbon in space is just inorganic in origin, given our experience here on Earth is so vastly different? Which means that perhaps there is a good reason for presuming the existence of a lot of other life forms in the rest of the Universe.

And that takes me to a random thought about electronic/mechanical life, which we're on the brink of creating, and which is going to be based on silicon and other materials that we don't consider a building block of life, and which (as far as we can tell) were never part of a living thing the way carbon was.

Maybe that's going to be one of the bases of a definition of life? That "life" has to be able to recycle it's own elements and molecules, over and over?

Swarm Wars

2009-07-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

Was just watching a news promo where the focus of one of the stories is on a child's bicycle tyre with drugs hidden inside. Have also read (of course) about the drug mini-subs that are being used to run stuff into the US. And I've reflected that all through history there have been various kinds of drug struggles between the eternal triangle of those who source, those who use, and those who prohibit.

There is a grass roots support group of people who want the drugs, who end up as the victims of course but perhaps that's the function of drugs, to act as some kind of Darwinian selector. Who knows. There is a group of people who want to supply those drugs in return for material gain of their own, no matter who that kills. And there are prohibitionists who act to try and save one group from the other.

It's kind of like war.

But, of course, martial type warfare is so much more advanced, for some reason, than drug wars. They have UAVs and packbots, and plenty of them. They save putting lives at risk, are relatively cheap and easy to put into the field, and can slip around almost undetected while carrying a warhead, camera, or other payload to a destination quite a distance away.

Oh yeah, and this follows on the heels of watching a TV article showing a small commercial factory unit successfully making small UAVs and delivery systems.

See, I wonder how long before you see (or don't see) flights of hundreds of small hard to detect unmanned robots, each carrying a small amount of drugs, random flight paths to widely spread destinations, and making it pretty much impossible to stop all of them. I'm almost betting within a few years you'll read about "swarms" of these things, drug suppliers aren't stupid and this is now proven technology...

This may be the last decade before the Coming Of The Drug Locusts...

Moth Wing Nanos?

2009-07-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

Just a sudden, intense, very vivid flash of memory:

When I was in my late 20's, my father and I were discussing huge scientific topics, if I recall, it was something along the lines of how long to spit-roast a pig in the hot 43C (100F) summer of Wittenoom, Western Australia. It included discussions of the effects of various bastings and a possible cure or marinade in plastic wrap for a day beforehand, and progressed via the (then still fairly new) concept of radio wave cooking (which became the familiar microwave of today) then meandered off into discussions of science and technology. We rambled a lot over a few beers, did Dad and I...

In the middle of that conversation, I killed a moth that was threatening to slurp up precious beer, and there was a cloud of dust from the wings of the moth, and dad got animated and mentioned that the dust off moth wings was harmful to inhale. He'd seen research that had established that moth wing dust was composed of - and I don't for the life of me remember if he actually said "nanoparticles" or just "microscopic particles" but it was pretty much the first time I'd actually thought about the properties of materials on a nano scale.

I incorporated a particular nanoparticle, a "monomolecule knife," into one of my unpublished Cycle novellas, on the back of thinking about nanoparticles for the next five years. And I've seen that science researchers have developed particular carbon nanotube structures based on examples from the animal kingdom, and now there's been advances in adhesive based on the micro hairs on the feet of the gecko. Other researchers have made significantly large single molecules which reminded me of the mono knife in my novella.

But so far I haven't heard about any nanotech researchers studying the fuzz on moth wings for an inspiration...

Just wondering - I tend to think of these things just around the same time as other people do, and often see my brainfarts made concrete by the magic of parallel development...

VIPRE Virus and Malware Protection

2009-07-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I worked as a System/Network Administrator for 15 years before my health caught up with me, and in that time I've made an observation or two about people. No matter what I did to protect the workstations, someone always found a way around it eventually. And of course, because I listened to my users, I found out what the objection was - performance hit. Any antivirus solution I deployed, caused serious performance degradation on the older boxes of the day.

It's to be expected then that with malware, machines, and malware protection all scaling up at roughly the same rate, that today's protection software would make about a similar percentage hit on performance of today's machines. To a great extent, this is sort of true. Modern virus and malware protection software causes a bit less of a slowdown, but every software I've tried still made a significant difference to the machines I tried them on.

Sunbelt Software have hired me to say a few words about their Antivirus Software named VIPRE. Being a conscientious type, I downloaded and installed the free 15 day trial of the software, and being a bit less than conscientious %) I then went to sleep and let it download the definitions and perform the first scan. That would be because I was doing this around 3AM my time and fell asleep at the desk. Therefore, I can't tell you if there was any thrashing the first time it ran - but I can tell you that I didn't notice it in the following few days, where every other A/V program I've ever known has caused unpredictable lagging and slowdowns.

Aside from the definition files, VIPRE can also run suspect programs in a virtual environment so it can't do any harm, helping VIPRE to identify and isolate malware. And while I don't personally use Outlook, VIPRE integrates with Outlook to catch email-borne malware as well.

Sunbelt Software have 15 day trial software available, I haven't uninstalled mine yet because, quite frankly, I'm thinking I might upgrade it to the full version. If I'd had something like this back when I was working, I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to convince users to not try and unload their A/V software...

As a further incentive, Sunbelt are also offering a price reduction (50%!) on their personal firewall product if you buy VIPRE. Sunbelt Personal Firewall is ranked quite highly by other writers, and if you were looking to protect your machine on multiple levels then you probably couldn't go far wrong if you took advantage of that offer. Even on a home computer or a machine already behind a home router firewall or office firewall, putting a personal one on your PC is still a good idea.

Dealing With The Internet In The Workplace.

2009-07-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

Most companies, since companies began to be the preferred business unit, have wanted just a few things from their employees: Be as young and energetic as possible; Be as experienced as the older staff; Spend 100% of your time working, no meal or toilet breaks would be just bewdiful thanks; Work for junior rates doing a senior job.

After all, it's not much to ask, is it? And yes yes yes I'm being sarcastic. The work day for all critters seems to be a big long but amusing search for food interspersed with intervals of work, not the other way around. Articles like this one demonstrate the efforts that management have to go to, in order to try and get that work/leisure/effort/effect balance right. Do you open the Internet? Block most of it? Have company firewalls, or secure application servers?

Let me put it this way - twenty years ago, how did companies prevent the equivalent circumstances? Instead of a firewall, there was a mailroom that inspected stuff going inbound and outward. Long employee chats with colleagues were examined for whether they were relevant to work or not, and then controlled as needed, by supervisors. And try as they might, employers had no way of preventing employees from walking out with company secrets firmly engraved in their brains, any more than they have a way today to prevent a company database walking out on an iPod or MP3 player or memory stick or card...

The thing that worked best, it turns out, is maintaining watchfulness. So here's a thought, given freely after nearly two decades of dealing with users and technology: Watch, Decide, Act.

Watch what happens in your office and on your LAN. Are your servers logging and flagging unusual events? That's the first thing you should be watching - and in order for the "unusual" flags to apply, you have to decide what constitutes "usual" and "unusual." Capture all traffic and put it through transparent proxies. not to prevent, but to record it. Experiment with the output of the logfile. A good analyser program will soon start telling you which machines spent how much time surfing what, where, and when.

Similarly monitor all accesses to your own servers and workstations. Is that new person poking around on the Sales VP's machine? That might be deemed "unusual," unless they are the SVP's secretary or PA. Is someone repeatedly trying to send malformed traffic to your SQL server? Time to check that they're not hacking you, or that their workstation might not be compromised by a Trojan.

As has been repeatedly pointed out, you can't prevent sufficiently determined employees from doing all the above and more. Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted may well lose you a horse, but shutting it before the horse bolts, prevents anything from happening in the barn at all. Making the door more person sized means all your chickens will still be able to escape, and raising it still won't prevent the rats and pigeons from using it...

The problem lies in working out what's usual and useful, compared to unusual and harmful. Block YouTube or FaceBook? Fine, but some people actually use those in the course of their duties. I might find it easier to post a video and let a sales prospect know about it via their FB account. On the other hand, I might also be using those two to dig up dirt on colleagues to coerce their cooperation with a pet project or a project to steal data...

In all the time I worked in IT and system and network admininstration, the problems such as the above were always "unusual," and that's generally how they were picked up, precisely because they were unusual. Locking down access and traffic generally resulted in less bandwidth, but no discernible change to the risk/benefit ratio. I became a great logfile reader, and picked up no end of minor breaches that way. There are now programs that do what I did, but they need to be trained and set up, and usually the person that has to do that is the system admin.

In an age where personal electronics is everywhere, it's also possible for an employee to place company data onto their personal multimedia device, then connect right up to the Mcdonalds hotspot right outside your office and upload that data - it takes only minutes, or even seconds given a suitably skilled person - and all your logs would show is that employee "Z" accessed the payroll database for a bit longer than normal.

That information didn't - and can't - help you at the time, but it will form a trail that can be backtracked on when you discover that your best people have been headhunted at salaries that are just the right margin above the salary you were paying them...

"Blocking" the external WiFi hotspot? You may as well try and hold back water with a flyscreen. And indeed it may well be illegal to block wireless communications, in some places, and with certain forms of wireless. (You may not, for example and as far as I'm aware) block mobile phone signals at any time, and what if your superduper "cellphone buster" that you've placed in operation to block employees from spending all their time calling friends and family also blocks cellphone access to the company next door? And if you reduce the range of the quencher, then you'll find knots of employees in the areas that the signal misses...

My personal belief is that keeping people engaged, involved, rewarded, and stimulated is the best way to command loyalty, and watchfulness to make sure that this loyalty doesn't waver is is the second step.

Veni Vidi Virus

2009-07-09T20:02:00.000-07:00

And here's the rest of the world catching up to my thoughts from years ago... In the dusty archives somewhere, I think I had an article about what will happen to implant wearers once those implants connect part of their real life bodies to the virtual world, to the real life world of script kiddies, sociopathic hackers, and other online entrepreneurs.

Here's one of the things that worried me then, and worries me now: If I have a prosthetic limb or just an enhancement to existing limbs, and this is controlled via a brain implant, which in turn has wireless connectivity to allow the control and adjustment of the augmentation. And if some script kiddie finds a way to reverse a few numbers somewhere. And I happen to be walking along an elevated footpath, I think "move right" and the brain implant issues a "move right" and the augmented limb then moves left. And happens to knock a fellow pedestrian off the footpath, they crack their head, and subsequently die.

Who's guilty now? Me for being the one who physically carried out the action leading to the death? The manufacturer of the system for not building in safeguards and intrusion protection? The hacker, wherever and whoever they may be, and who may have carried out the hack without any knowledge of where i was and what I was doing at the time?

This situation isn't just going to apply to body-worn augments, of course. Assume I'm and early adopter and have a personal robot assistant. Or (and this would be one reason car manufacturers might be a tad shy to put automatic drive controls in their cars) I have a personal transporter that pretty much runs on autopilot and connects via mobile broadband to download routes from Google Maps. Only Google Maps has been hacked and along with the map it downloads a zero-day payload...

You can see that where the Law has been slow to catch up with current cyber wrongdoing, the rate of change is about to ratchet up by another whole order of moral and legal decisions needing to be made.

Saw Point

2009-07-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

As a teenager, I was pretty handy in manual arts, both woodwork and metalwork. I remember once I left high school pricing the odd tools for handyman jobs both at my parents' house and my own projects, and one of the more highly priced (and prized) of my hand tools was a Disston foxtail saw. Back then I didn't know the background or the history of Disston saws, I just knew that they were one of the better quality saws available, they were imported from "overseas," and I saved a few weeks before I could buy mine.

Now the back story is filled in for me, by this short story and the lovely slideshow of pictures, of the history of Disston Saw Works in Philadelphia.

Upload Thyself.

2009-06-09T23:40:00.000-07:00

So now we're going to get a method to upload your body to a computer. Fair enough, it's just a virtual body, but that's all you need in virtual life. I've already posited that this will happen, and that we'll also get the technology to upload our brains. (Don't ask me when - look wayyyy back in this blog, cos I predicted this wayyyyy back...)

So am I going to sit back smugly and say I tolja so? YOU BETCHA! %)

Tolja so! Nyah!

The World Just Shook, Microscopically...

2009-06-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

And with that, "grey goo" came a step closer...

Day Not At The Office

2009-05-26T08:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's working in IT. Or maybe just working at an office that Scott Adams could have based his comic strip on. But it puts me of a mind to agree with this Treehugger article. The days of the office are over.

One of my least favourite activities had to be meetings. Once, sometimes twice a week. To begin with. But then suddenly there were meetings to schedule meetings, meetings to discuss stuff raised at other meetings, and more. I'd often take a wirelessly-connected laptop to those meetings so that while it might look like I only had my notes and spreadsheets with me, I was actually remote logged into the servers and doing the work that I would have been doing had the damn meeting not been called...

So I agree - in a teleconf, who hasn't been doing other things? And why not? That whole argument by Lane wallace smacks of someone who doesn't have focus, or at least who doesn't trust the rest of humanity to be as focused as her. Yes I can understand that some people would use teleworking as their chance to goof off and just draw wages - but that's where management have to take a responsibility for monitoring and - surprise! - managing their teams. If someone isn't performing, invite them to the (much smaller) office for a face to face if you must, or preferably have a telemeeting with them. If that doesn't get their attention and their work ethic, then dismissal is always an option - after all, there's going to be ONE person in the world who will see that job as interesting and an opportunity...

I've worked from home with people around the globe, on servers at the end of a chain of VLANs and VPNs and office networks, and even for an IT administrator who needs to reboot and restart servers, it was possible to set up mechanisms that meant I rarely had to be onsite. I've done helpdesk and remote admin for people up and down the state - while sitting on the edge of the bed watching TV and chatting with my partner.

Our Sales force were more on the road than at the office, and didn't even use a home office, instead using their laptops, mobile phones, and a dash of ingenuity to work remotely long before teleworking became a buzzword. Most of our office staff that were in the office could easily have worked from home instead, the only thing keeping them at work was the management who were not at all receptive to teleworking or trusting of their staff to remain work-centric if they weren't under a watchful gaze and itchy whip hand. I've got news for them, 75% of the office staff goofed off for periods of from 30 to 120 minutes every day anyway...

Lastly - I think I mentioned in another blog post that smaller enterprises are going to be a bit of a market force to deal with. And it's also going to be the enterprises that work smarter, and can cover more of the globe. You can organise almost anything using the Internet these days, and the 'almost' will be covered before another year or two have gone, mark my words. Instead of having an office full of local people - many of whom will suffer from that "I'm only here for the wages" syndrome - you can pick a smaller, dedicated team from anywhere in the world. And have a presence 24/7, everywhere.

They say that if you find a job you like, you'll never work for a living again. And if you raise your sights when looking for staff to fill positions, you're more likely to find that person that actually likes the job you're offering, and reap the benefits...

Can Haz New New Inventors Plz?

2009-05-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

I've just had the most wonderful trip around the garden path, and I haven't even left my chair... As long-time readers know, I have ideas, eminently capitalisable ideas, and of the last five years at least, those ideas have been focused on making a difference to energy use, climate change, and sustainable resources use.

Today I think I experienced the ultimate "innovation" oxymoron. I went to an Australian Government department whose sole function is to nurture innovative ideas, and got shunted around Australia a bit, then finally told that they don't actually deal in innovation, but in fully-formed innovative business ideas. That was the main gist of the conversation I had with the various people on the phone. "We're not actually interested in innovation so much as in the business making money from innovation..."

There are research grants, too, yes, I nearly forgot. But for ideas and concepts that are already under development and which have projected earnings. So if I have an idea for a way to make a motor vehicle more environmentally friendly, I have to somehow fund enough research (on a pension) to prove that I can produce the whole thing (i.e. a prototype) and then have done all the market research (again, on a pension) to prove that people will flock to it and buy it in droves, despite any future further economic downturns or disasters? And I'm supposed to do this so that I can prove to that department that I don't need them? Please to be off-buggering now, government department.

And thanks for all the fish, cos it sure wasn't any help!

Hippus Handshoe

2009-05-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

A nice hand job from Holland...

ORBs #1

2009-05-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

Occasional Random Brainpharts (ORBs) seems to be a way to go - so many news articles that start me on a train of thought, interrupted, that isn't enough for a decent article, but is worthy of mention. So I'll start collecting a few and see how I go.

Random thoughts #1:
Why does Hubble need grapple hooks? Repelling Somalian Space Pirates? Or are we hoping to snag a Vogon construction vessel?

Random thoughts #2:
Maybe the Renegade Scout ship will come from a place named by Venetia Phair.

Random thoughts #3:
Do bras need grapple hooks, or is that just what we males do?

Random thoughts #4:
For heaven's sake, why bother with the bomb body in this case? Why not just drop the capsules directly from a hopper? Save all that extra manufacturing? And, lastly, neatly looping this thread, maybe these capsules could benefit from some form of grapple hook to anchor them to the ground...

Another Day, Another Lying Company

2009-05-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

Hmm - I wonder why people have lost faith in just about every business ever... Latest assholes are a VOIP/phone service provider who trumpet "No more line rental fees!" all over their sign-up page. Their plans start from $9.95 a month.

Hang on - a month? So you actually still do charge a monthly fee (that any other telco calls the line rental fee) but without the messy business of actually having to provide, you know, a line... Talk about slimy.

But I'm fair, even when the company appears not to be. I emailed them for some information on the "no line rental fees!" thing. Did this mean that $9.95 was available for call charges?

The monthly plans do not include their fees as call credit. So on the $9.95 plan this does not mean it includes $9.95 of calls each month. You do however get access to lower rates and in some cases free calls. The plans includes a standard local Australian phone number which allows incoming calls from any telephone service. There is no contract so you can change plans or cancel at any time.

Hmmm. Just because you call it something different, VOIPco, doesn't mean it's not the same thing. Please stop lying to me, my IQ is above the "average" of 110. (And isn't that another ad that shits you? The average IQ is, by definition, 100. If you got that, and decided not to go get your IQ tested by such idiots, then you've automatically passed...)

Anyway - I guess those ads are back in force. Stay tuned for more as I think of them...

Aussie Impeller Propels Itself Overseas

2009-04-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

I do like this new impeller in this video, it's quite an achievement. Jay Harman developed it, sounds to me like he might be an Aussie. His company PAX Scientific seems to be offshore, but I may be wrong. I wouldn't be surprised though to see PAX overseas, because in Australia we've traditionally discouraged the innovators and forced them to go somewhere else to develop the idea. Here's another piece of info on the PAX Lily Impellers. It also seems to imply that PAX Sci and Jay Harman are not in Oz any more, Toto...

You have to love that we give the rest of the world so many good minds and killer developments...

Head In Clouds, Feet On Ground.

2009-04-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing. Who hasn't quailed at hearing that term, over and over, for the last year? It's also not so much the words themselves, as the opinions for and against, all given as Every Absolute Truth You Always Wanted To Know About Cloud Computing But Were Afraid To Ask. And to me the emphasis seems to be on the "Every" rather than the "Absolute." No-one really knows how well it's going to work, who's going to be financing and making the clouds, how well Cloudsourcing Company A's cloud is going to interact with Cloudsourcing Company B's cloud, and whether it will be the answer to your prayers or not.

I'm definitely not an expert on any of that. When I was working I found it was hard enough to keep up with my own server rooms and remote disaster recovery facilities. I did, however, find time to play with virtualisation and cluster computing. And improved a few places I worked at, I might add. I can and will add my voice on the subject of CC.

To begin with, I think CC will benefit small enterprises and home businesses the most. If you have a LAN and a broadband router going at ADSL2+ speeds, then you will gain a cloudy server room out there, without the cost of owning hardware, the ongoing air conditioning and electricity and consumed space costs. They'll probably be the first to entrust data and logins to the cloud, the first to use cloudsourced computing power to get their product out to their public.

Home users too will be able to see some gains. Storage, for a start. How wikkid to stash your files *here* and then go *there* and be able to work on those same files? Yeah, totally. And using a legit copy of Microsoft Office online versus risking being caught with a "liberated" version? Priceless. (Or not... %)

But established businesses with more than a few servers will find that it's less percent of gain to them. Because, you will no doubt prefer to keep local logins, for the time being at least. And the most sensitive files - that's human nature, after all. In almost all cases, I see the IT staff will be the ones pushing for this and trying to make a business case for CC. Management just isn't (sorry CEOs and other ULM) very savvy about IT, because if they were, they'd be in IT instead of management. It's like saying that because a person is skilled at using surfboards, they are great at making them. Or vice versa. People have skill sets.

I had to "sneak" virtual computing into the network, find an old clunker server and slip VMware onto it, then install a server virtual machine and use it for a non-core service, then find another non-critical server service and slip that onto the same machine, until I could reliably switch between the mission-purposed machine and the VM without a hassle. Then I switched the mission-purposed machines off and waited for one of the random inspections to reveal that we were using less machines and electricity and still fulfilling all our IT needs...

I'd tried to get official sanction for VM technology, but it kept getting put off and put off. Never outright forbidden mind you, and so I took the initiative. But I figure CC will need to pull much the same stunt.

There's a few other questions that everyone who wants to use CC will need to answer. Who's going to pay for this? Will it cost you a significant outlay and significant ongoing costs, more than half of what you'd expect to pay for keeping these services locally? Because then, I can see that given the other drawbacks of CC, you might be better off keeping those services locally.

Will there be a significant security risk for you? How sensitive is the service and associated data for you? Because, in the case of an attack on a local server cluster after your customer data, for example, your IT department can, as a last resort, physically pull the network cable to that cluster. I "pulled the plug" on our entire internet connection when the company webserver farm was hit by one of the first ever DDoS attacks back in the early days, saved us a bundle because in those days bandwidth was expensive.

If someone is cracking into your data in a cloudsourced situation, you don't get the option to shut that service down. Indeed, if a critial set of CC servers goes down you don't even get the choice to call your IT staff and have them do a callout.

Sorry if this is an overly simplistic view of CC - but I'm often an overly simplistic person when it comes to those things, and it's generally stood me in good stead. I'm often overly conscious of security or reliability implications that my management considered too slim a chance to worry about - and invariably were glad they'd let me plug anyway... And I can see so many points of failure and breach in CC that it makes my eyes water and my palms sweat.

All that said, I do use Google's mail and apps almost exclusively, with Star Office locally, and I use several other software services "out there" to store and synchronise files, bookmarks, and photographs. I use services "out there" to collaborate with other people and run projects. I just make sure I have some form of local backup, is all...

Space Tech Comparison

2009-04-14T18:06:00.000-07:00

We've come a long way. I mean, just look at this, which you can find among other things here, and which are to be auctioned off next month. I remember as a kid playing with components that large, that clumsy, and that simple.

That's a few transistors in those cylindrical shields/heatsinks, seven of them by the looks of it. A modern CPU chip contains hundreds of thousands of transistors on a single sliver of silicon...

And you think to yourself "OMG! We sent people into space. With equipment like THAT..."

Scarily, we now have spacecraft with modern technology and equipment inside, and they don't seem to fly half as well nor fulfill their missions half as often...

Broadband Initiative 2.0

2009-04-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

With gardening taking up most of my productive time (and leaving me pretty stuffed afterwards and basically cbf to blog) I've been a bit lax in feeding stories into the blogs. But also in my defense, there hasn't been much that made me want to reach for the keyboard, either....

Remember when I worked out that Telstra's bid for the national broadband initiative showed that they had been fully expecting to make several billions in clear profit from their shabbily prepared tender? Reading this shows me that there's a far deeper problem involved.

It looks like every company involved in the tender thought they were going to clear billions and billions in profit... And what can that be traced back to? Well, I think Telstra's lazy insolent smugness at having been the monopolistic sole telco for Australia for so long, has rubbed off onto every other telco they've been involved in. It's always been easy to stay under Telstra's prices, but even easier to keep prices high and blame Telstra for their monopoly pricing to other telcos.

Sol Trujillo leaving has been one of the best things to happen to Telstra - to date. I won't say it was the best thing ever because now we need to watch what the new incumbent(s) do. Letting other companies lay their own fibers has also been one of the best things to date - and one of the worst.

Because many of those telcos that laid in fiber are overseas companies, and while it seems inevitable that we'll soon have to think in terms of one global economy, that time isn't quite here yet. (It should be, but it's not. Long story...) So for the moment our choice is to bleed our dollars into Telstra's pockets, or into the pockets of an Asian telco cartel, or something. When Telstra was still a government-owned and operated department, we probably didn't mind so much because we were kind of keeping it in the family.

Now, it's unacceptable. It's distasteful, and even worse, it's now put us somewhere in the range of third world countries when it comes to price of digital access. I'd like to bring a quick observation to the table. When I was running an ISP back in the mid 90's, data access was via ISDN lines, and our clients accessed our server via 33K dialup modems. The cost of the ISDN data was actually quite reasonable.

Then Telstra realised in the late 90's that it was sitting on an untapped goldmine, and the price went up from 9c to 19c a meg and only a few years after that, the ISP sold to another ISP. But think about that for the moment - if you have a 5Gb a month cap on your downloads, then at those prices you'd be paying $950 a month for that data. Before allowing for inflation, which would make your download limit worth about $3500 in real terms,,,

And that 19c/meg figure is still around to this day. Yep, it's just migrated to GPRS data rates. So people with mobile phones with no 3G/HSDPA capability can look forward to big bills month after month, and really, data plans for mobile broadband aren't anywhere near realistic yet either. While landline customers check their price in Gb, (and find that they are paying perhaps $8/Gb) mobile broadband users are still ekeing out their data in Mb's and finding that they are paying 3c/Mb or about $35/Gb on average, or four times as much as the landline customer.

And most of that is down to pure price gouging and "socially acceptable" price fixing between the telcos. Because that's the way it's been done "since Telstra days..."

I've noticed something else. In eight years of having broadband, at three different places in a capital city and one in immediately surrounding areas, I've NEVER had acceptable performance from the existing broadband infrastructure. Currently being in the "surrounding area" I have a 512K connection of old style ADSL which has a latency delay of about 5 - 25 seconds on everything. At previous locations I've had ADSL and ADSL2 connections that barely managed 200K, or which disconnected and reconnected every hour due to line noise. You get the idea.

The best performance I EVER got was a one month love affair with mobile broadband, where I was getting 1.5M speeds with almost no latency - but paying $30 a month for 1Gb and then exorbitant prices once I went over that...

So when K-Rudd talks in expansive terms about "national broadband networks" that will solve all our woes, I wish I could be as certain of that myself... See, amid fears that the Internet is at the limit of what can be done with TCP-IP4 protocol, and we're approaching the bandwidth limits of what the network can sustain, I know that we will always find a way to make infrastructure do more with less, and also we will continue to pump infrastructure into the data economy. But will our "national broadband network" be the right technology for that? They are, after all, touting a seven to eight year timespan and a LOT changes in IT in just 18 months...

So let's hope that the new "conglomerate" doesn't A) decide it's Telstra 2.0 and plans to make huge profits this round of tenders, B) decide it's Telstra 2.0 and can become a new monopoly and C) decide it's Telstra 2.0 and deliver Internet 0.1 standards...

Soft Robotics - The Right And Wrong

2009-03-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

"Soft robotics" being something like this article. Watch the video, then see if you spot three things I spotted right away. I thought of all three in the space of the last 20 seconds of the movie.

Maybe that's because I've already used this method in an experiment I carried out, 25 years ago. Yep, quarter of a century ago...

See, I got hold of an experimenter's kit of that Nitinol memory wire. Nitinol, for anyone that never heard of it, was the original "memory metal" that you heated, bent into a shape, then allowed to cool in that shape. Now you could bend it or stretch it to another shape, and when you heated it again, it resumed the first shape it had "remembered." In the case of the experimenter kit, the wire just shrank in length when it was heated. Looking at the "tentacle" that thet were demonstrating, you can see where this was going can't you?

First point, and a major point of difference between their clumsy thing and mine - why use four "muscles" ? Unless your aim was to exactly mimic and octopus' tentacle, in which case they were still short of the central sheath muscle. My "gripper" used three "muscles" made of Nitinol, which pretty much used up my precious stock of the stuff.

Second point: Using "draw wire" technology is not going to be the same as using this stuff I wrote about in the previous article. The "muscle" fibers can be embedded in the structure of the flexible limb, meaning more precision about where the force is applied

Last point. They are only worrying about a cable-like muscle in tractive mode. But big advances have also been made in tubular fibres which inflate and shorten through the use of compressed air or liquid. I'm betting it's just a matter of aligning or "weaving" these new carbon fibre muscles and you can mimic the compressive/shortening mode that biological muscles use.

So - if they thought about embedding three bundles of traction-mode fibres with three bundles of compression mode fibres alternating, they could pretty much mimic the octopus' tentacle. If you include with this a central "core muscle" filled with liquid, and tapered the "muscle" ends and the arm body, you would have something that would be considerably better than a tentacle.

Oh - and the reason I didn't try doing more with my Nitinol "gripper?" Because the wire got hot, it would tend to cut into the plastics I had access to after a while. Silicon rubber tubing was too expensive for me to use, and very soft so the wire would have cut into it too, anyway. I gave it away as an idea too far ahead of the technology at the time. Now I wish I had access to some of the new materials that these guys have...

Artificial Muscle Molto Strong, Tough

2009-03-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

Cyberdyne muscles (http://i.gizmodo.com/5176213/these-carbon-nanotube-muscles-are-30-times-stronger-than-human-muscles) are getting closer...

This is one of those breakthroughs that will require more breakthroughs before we can use it to full effect in a human being - imagine a muscle ten times stronger and a thousand times faster responding, attached to your relatively brittle skeleton... So certain amounts of skeleton modification will also be needed. I think I mentioned this problem way back in the archives section of the blog, how replacing muscles would snap skeleton bones.

The less obvious problem will be in the relearning process - imagine a muscle that *snaps* to the new position a thousand times faster than your original muscle did - your nervous system wouldn't be able to cope, and before you'd had a chance to realise that the muscle had started moving, it would have arrived, overshot the mark, and kept going to the point of twisting a limb right off. Or smacking yourself in the head. So nerves (which conduct at relatively low speeds, which is why reflexes are such slow things) would need to be replaced.

A robot powered by this, on the other hand, would be able to move with lightning speed, precision, and reflexes... Making this best suited to robotics for the time being. But bear in mind that I've also predicted that it won't be long now before we can transfer an entire human "mind" like software, so the robot may not be as dumb as planned...

This is, then, a really great advance, providing us with a new technology for medicine and robotics, but it will need a lot of supporting technology to make it applicable to medicine.

Find Your Kindle 2 PID, Use It As You See Fit!

2009-03-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

Stuff Amazon.com! They can't stop you doing with the hardware which you bought as you wish, because insisting you only load it with amazon.com content is like Toyota making a car that only take Toyota brand petrol.

Mind you, no-one would be stupid enough to buy a car that only ran on one specific brand of petrol, so what does that say about you, Kindle2-buying elitist tosser?

Never mind - find yourself a link to the kindlepid.py script here, let Amazon try and issue me a fucking takedown notice!

C-Zen Fun

2009-03-11T17:14:00.000-07:00

I like this EV much more betterer... As I say often, EVs currently all look like they derived from the same perverse desire to make the driver look like a pretentious tasteless prat, at least this buggy has a touch of style about it. Trust the French.

Aside from one thing, I like it. Reliance on Li-ion technology makes this a less eco-friendly idea. Time to look at other ways to store and use that energy.

Secure Access With Devices

2009-03-02T20:00:00.000-08:00

Skribe picked up this nice piece of footage that shows almost precisely what I find wrong with digital technology - it's stuck in the box. The video is nice, if somewhat MS-centric.

But here's the problem: I have three computer machines at home, and one of them is on generally anytime I am, often two or sometimes even all three. I have basic remote control between the machines by VNC, LogMeIn, and Synergy. This is all 3rd party software (and in LMI's case, a 3rd party server) that I need to run in order to just share myself among the computers. It's clumsy. I have to log into each of the machines, run the relevant software, then go to the machine I want to control others from, run the master software of whichever instance I'm using, and then find the controlled machine and log in again.

Each of these softwares that I mentioned does something different. VNC works within my network, LogMeIn is better for finding machines that are farther afield on the network, or when I'm farther afield and need to get back to one of the machines at home. These two bring the remote machine's screen to my screen so I can treat the remote computer like an application. (But with provisos, read on.) Synergy is different in that it transfers my mouse movements and keystrokes to the controlled machine, but uses the screen on that machine as the display. This makes it suitable for times when I have my laptop and PC side by side and only got room for one keyboard and mouse, and don't want to use a manual mechanical KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switch.

I've become quite adept at picking and flicking between these remote control apps depending on situation, and to some degree they offer functionality I would hate to have to live without. I can be sitting here in my kitchen using the laptop, pop open a VNC terminal to the PC which acts as a simple server and media PC, and change the volume of the music it's playing through my lounge room speakers. I can close the streaming audio and instead open up a video which is relevant to what I'm working on. (I could do much the same using Synergy, if my eyesight were good enough to read the other screen at 8 meters distance, VNC just brings things up close in that aforementioned local application window.)

But now I want to drag a video I'm watching here on my laptop to the PC, and the troubles start... If I drag the video and drop it onto the window which holds the remote session, everything stops. If I want to drag a tab from my Chrome browser on the laptop to the Chrome browser (or any other browser actually) on the PC, things come to a halt. And let's not even talk about what happens when I want to edit a document that resides on the PC using the Open Office Writer here on the laptop...

One reason for this supremely useless behaviour is that we don't have any means of authentication of the user. We're distrustful of who might be accessing our data via remote control, so it's walled-in pretty comprehensively. "No you may NOT have this file, I don't know who you are!" even though I might be logged in at the laptop 8 meters away and the laptop is happy with my credentials that doesn't mean a thing to the PC. Yet if there was a shred of intelligence built into the OS's, they would accept each other's validation (maybe after making ONE manually guided connection between my login creds on the laptop and the login creds on the PC) and realise that the laptop is portable and may be found accessing the network from different physical locations, so there will need to be some additional validation done.

The other is that there's no secure way to network the two machines - I'm effectively on a public medium. So I need to establish a VPN tunnel using another third party software such as Hamachi. The list of things that my operating systems don't do is phenomenal. Do I actually care if a window closes or animates down to a pinpoint and winks out of existence? Not a helluva lot. But ask me about portable login and applications and I'd be all ears and a deeper wallet...

Anyhow - back to the validation process. Then it becomes just a matter of realising which machines a person is using, establish some kind of pattern to their use of those machines, and their login and validation credentials on each machine. IPv6 and other network identification and location schemes will make it easier to establish where the user is, and that will give clues. It should be possible to establish a few things that I can and can't do, such as fly at lightspeed, use a machine that's known to be secured to someone else's use only, or a machine registered to a corporation or network that I'm not a member of.

If I've logged in from somewhere in Mandurah at 0800hrs, there is virtually nil chance that I will be logging in from Hillarys Boat Harbor at 0815hrs. Just to make sure there isn't a super high speed transit between the two points and it could be me after all, a second layer of security can be activated. "Please provide a biometric, the password to your diary software, and tell me what you removed from the refrigerator this morning." The latter works if you have a fridge that scans barcodes on the way in and out,but it's just one example. The security system could as easily ask you which online news site you visited, or what was the last email you remember reading. (Don't forget that your "network" of machines can communicate with each other and ask one another questions like this - so the PC you sit at in the Library can, once you've established identity, query your server at home, or a machine you used recently at your office, for some validation detail.)

In this way you have opened a "security tunnel" between the two machines. (Or three machines, or four, or a whole server room full of them if that's how you roll.) You can use this to also establish and encrypt the network VPN tunnel I mentioned earlier is needed, so that the VPN becomes keyed to your current identification details. If you move to another machine and validate properly, then the VPN key fits and you have a tunnel to/from that machine also. As long as the new machine is within a logically attainable distance of the last machine you logged in from, of course. And not located in some Internet cafe or public access terminal or other place that's denied to your login.

And now that you have the VPN tunnel, there should be absolutely no reason whatsoever that I can't drag a file from the server to the word processor on the remote machine, edit it, and save it back to the server. Or drag a URL from the browser here to a favourites folder over there. Yes, I appreciate that the word processor on the remote machine may be compromised, and could wreak havoc.

Yes, the browser I'm using could attach 140 extra characters to the URL in order to lead my server to a zombiemaster website. But those risks are inherent everywhere and can happen anytime to any machine anyplace. Security needs to be a bit more flexible. Once I have that tunnel established, I can send software to intercept every application my authenticated user opens and scan it on the fly - do I trust it? - and make the call then as to whether to accept the file or reject it and suggest sending it in a more basic format.

If necessary I could even run my own word processor from my secure home server on this terminal I'm using via the VPN - it's not just data that should be possible to flow from one machine to the next - and that way I'm never using a compromised application.

The video makes it clear that Microsoft at least thinks they have some of those problems sorted out, and shows windows flying from one device to the next without frontiers or borders. I would have been happy to see one "Access Denied - this is a public resource" warning or something, but I'll presume they did think of these things.

And I'm standing by my statement that eventually the difference between a computer and anything else (such as a key tag or a door) will blur and become kind of indistinct. And when that does happen, and you want to store your data and distribute it out to your workplace, your coffee shop, your vehicle, your prospective customer's place, your entertainment wall in your home - it will always be riding shotgun on who you are, where you are, and if this is what you decided earlier is appropriate use of the data.

Once this happens you can get to the happy situation where you carry a data card with you and it unlocks relevant content on any public machines you are walking by, through RFID or cellphone technology, and if your wallet is stolen, you can establish new credentials through the security mechanism, and the instant that you do, your stolen ID's (which your security software knows were all in the same wallet that just got stolen) all become inactive at once.

In fact, if the thief tries to use them even once in a manner that raises suspicion in the security system and is unable to validate using one of the other mechanisms such as biometric or knowing your last email, then that entire cluster of access devices is flagged as compromised until you validate them again.

And of course, a whole class of currently annoying and bothersome exploits such as botnet herding become several orders of magnitude more difficult to do, because no-one can be in two places at once, and botnets are by definition geographically disparate. So things like spam also become difficult, because each one is now identified by your particular validated ID.

You can't be sending an email from several hundred machines at once, nor sending to millions of "friends" at once. Ditto for spammed Twitter messages, or IM's or even SMS spam - if it doesn't make sense, and if you did subvert a machine locally to do it, the other machines along the chain will realise that you can't do this and silently stem it.

I wonder what else is brewing in the very near future?

Sometimes An Article Is Just Sh*t N Filler

2009-02-28T20:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wish people would cover a subject properly instead of just waffling. Reading this article has left me with a lasting and indelible impression that DC power transmission is just a load of shit. Comic book shit, but shit all the same. Aside from the title of the article being a 100% lie (the article explains nothing about HVDCT) it's actually counterproductive and creates the impression that treehuggers are all clueless hippie airheads - not a good image for eco aware people...

It's especially sad when there are these other issues to report on, new engine technology, and new (though still derivative-looking) electric cars. Oh and while I'm getting pissed off at Gizmodo-related sites - AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH! to the annoying, stupid totally crass term "leccy tech" for EVs. Stupid asswipes that are using this echolalic term are doing more to damage the credibility of EVs than Ford and GM and Shell and BP combined, ffs.

Ion Drive made from a Coke Can

2009-02-26T23:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpEnnUHo9yg Unless it's total bullshit, this would appear to be a ver cheaply constructed ion drive.

Paint It Bend It Spray It On - The Electronics Revolution

2009-02-26T20:00:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I remember reading about paintable, bendable electronics online. The article had a wistful, "wouldn't it be great if . . . ?" tone, and mentioned some "promising research" being done. Then a year ago flat flexible OLED displays were "imminent." In all these cases, the timeline was a few years into our future. And yet, here's the payoff:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/plextronics-launches-d-line-shows-off-potential-of-solar-powered-lighting-technology.php Paint - on technology. Flexible.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/spray-on-solar-panels-could-be-sold-2011.php ...and spray on solar panels. Flexible.

Is it just me or are there possibilities here? Let's look at some implications for this technology:

It will be possible to pretty much put it anywhere. That includes your cutlery and crockery, a flat slab of styrofoam painted to look like a book, shopping bags, windows, the roof of your electric vehicle...

It'll very rapidly become cheap. That means you will find it on your shopping bags, your cutlery and crockery, and made into a lightweight e-book reader, as well as allowing your EV to "graze" on sunlight wherever you park it.

Once people see it in use, they will think of more uses for it. I'm pretty pedestrian in my predictions, I can see a time when it will even be on pills and medications you take, to target the drugs to the right places, and measure the effect the drugs are having and adjust the dosage on the fly. It will probably also be on your money (credit, debit, whatever) cards, furniture, and walls.

When electronics becomes this common and this invisible, and connectivity and intelligence can be built in, you're onto something that will change the world more than the Internet has. Combine this with something like the Phantom OS currently developed in Russia (and the resultant programming upheaval it will create) and you have a seriously BIG change in technology and how we and it interact.

On the subject of Phantom - (here is what seems to be their homepage, by the way) there are some programmers who will know this kind of "run in place" style of operating system like the backs of their hands - all the programmers who made programs for the Tandy M100 and Tandy M200 "laptop" computers of the '80's. Because they used a very similar way of operating - files and programs were written to nonvolatile memory and switching on and off just meant stopping in mid-read or whatever, and then restarting at that same point as though nothing had happened.

So devices using Phantom technology will start up instantly and carry on doing whatever they were doing when the power went off. Seems to be a boon for solar controllers and low-power monitoring and remote control devices to me. And of course for advertising signs that could steal the power of your mobile phone transmission to light themselves up only when there was someone with a cellphone nearby, or - hell, I'm sure you can see millions of uses for this technology...

As I used to say for my BBS, TEdLIVISION: "-- don't touch that dial!!!" - there are a whole load of new and interesting applications of this technology coming to a common item near you, and probably sooner than you think!

Sixth Sense - One Day It Will Be Internal.

2009-02-26T08:00:00.001-08:00

PLEASE NOTE: I've been evangelising the coming of this technology for several years now. And here (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090205/tc_afp/usitinternetresearchtedmit) it is.

Hang on, you're saying, these guys have produced a projector and smart stuff to overlay images on your surroundings. That's not the same as your NanoNeuroNet[(c)2000-2020 teddlesruss] technology.

I direct your attention to the closing sentence. I'm not the only one thinking implantable reality-augmentation.

The only difference is that they are still thinking "fiche'n'chips" with hardware manufactured and then surgically implanted - a technique that will not work unless you trust a robot, with its ability to mechanically make hundreds of thousands of connections, to go poking around in your brain and "plumbing in" the hardware. Also, you'll be carrying discrete lumps of hardware inside your head, some of it may weigh a gramme or more. That's the kind of thing that would turn into a lethal, brain-jellifying, missile in case of an accident at high speed, or in the worst scenario, if you walked head-on into a glass door. Do you really want a few dozen quite massive bullets inside your body?

On the other hand, I'm thinking nanotechnology, a whole series of self-organising solutions that you inject and which arrange themselves along neurons and synapses, forming in effect a spidery scaffold that is distributed all through your body and weighs almost nothing compared to the existing nerve cells.

This technology would be less invasive, and has a few curious side effects. In effect, your nervous system and brain become very hardy, as most "natural" deaths are due to neurological failures, nerves stop conducting, synapses misfire more and more. Because you have this scaffold in place, neurological failure becomes much less of a problem. You get to live longer.

The second side effect is something that's not immediately obvious. But the speed of conduction is several orders of magnitude different between nerve cells (very slow) and metal or some metallic nanoparticle. In effect, your reflexes and motor skills will improve dramatically. The only problem would be a feeling of disorientation until your brain learned to ignore the neural signals that would arrive a full couple of milliseconds AFTER the new NNN's signal had already arrived and been acted on.

So here's a technology I've envisioned for almost a decade now, and which is becoming more and more possible by each day's research being done around the world. I won't even hesitate to say that several military projects are already at the "injecting NNN goo" stage, and would not be surprised to hear that at least some of the test had been successful.

Now I no longer wonder how long before they make an NNN, I wonder how long before someone figures out how to download one's NNN to a backup device...

VR Magic Carpet

2009-02-25T18:17:00.000-08:00

Slow and tiny steps. That's what the subject in this article has to take, and it's what the VR developers are currently taking. The tiny slow steps of a new technology, painful, and one day to be looked back on with a kind of "Geez - can you imagine that?" mixture of nostalgia and horror.

I mean - watch the video. The chap "demonstrating" the floor has to shuffle like an arthritic centenarian in a stupor, it's so slow and creaking and painstaking. I took a look at the page where Dr Iwatoo is mentioned, but Google kindly translated the page from Japanese for me, meaning I understood it less than I would have the Kanji characters, but I gather that there is rather a lot of VR technology attributable to the good doctor and/or institutions he worked at, most of which is baffling even without the translation. Would you lock yourself inside what looks like a giant ant and immerse yourself in VR that way? *shudder* It scares me, that does.

But on the matter of the robo-floor, I do have a few suggestions. Like - a LOT more tiles. And a much tighter moving algorithm. Part of the problem is that tiles do large circuits which take time to complete. And they're not all that fast to begin with. And they're noisy. And need batteries. What would be nice would be if we could just sort of fit a magic carpet into a shoe...

Well, how about this thought? Put an inductive grid under the floor, and matching coils/magnets in the soles of a pair of "VR overshoes." Now you can just float the user backwards and forwards on roller ball bearings, you can simulate climbing and acceleration by tilting the floor, and more.

Ewwww! Mammoth Germs!

2009-02-25T13:20:00.000-08:00

I wonder what happened with this - one article, and then nothing. Generally this could mean one of a few things:

The inoculation of mammoth bacteria ended up having an "unexpected" side effect of perhaps killing the poor little mousies it was given to.
The inoculation works as expected, and the research team is going into secret development phase and will come up with something that will make Viagra seem insignificant by comparison.
Or, no other news department has picked up on this, and no-one's announced anything, and the research department involved has been eliminated because this is too potentially destabilising.

I'm wondering too if perhaps the lily was gilded just a little bit, and the results perhaps weren't anything as spectacular as claimed... Actually, when you read the article, it sounds like the premise for a modern comic book series, where "An ancient life-form rises to once again reclaim the Earth!" and then much apocalypse happens...

Also - does that mean that mammoths were once the virile, almost immortal, rulers of the Earth and had a science far superior to ours? More importantly - what killed them off, is it time to find the mammoth version of tinfoil hats and bunker down if this bacterium gets loose?

I've Been Mind Melded! Augh!

2009-02-25T00:22:00.000-08:00

Ever fallen victim to a meme? Or had one of those groupthink moments when everyone all has the same vision at the same time? Or have you gone for a whole week where everything you stumbled across seemed to have a theme of "thirteen?"

Check. I've been thinking about a small boat that I could use to get out to fishing spots without having to find a ramp to launch, and (due to emphysema making heavy efforts impossible) that would be easy to trailer. All coincidentally, I found a video of some early 1900's technology which promised to do exactly what I needed - with some heavy modification - and had started working on a design that had two "hulls" which were each in two parts, and several raised arched struts connecting the hulls which held the main boat slung underneath them. I sketched out several "napkin" versions, and started collecting material for a one meter model to test it out.

Then I saw this. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/ugo-contis-spider-boat-is-super-fuel-efficient.php and realised that someone stole my brane again! Beginning to wonder if I maybe should invest in a tinfoil hat... %)

Well, to be fair, Ugo has been working on that boat for a lot longer than I have. But we both started the same way, and have come up with very similar designs. Although I can say with smug glee that mine will be capable of going even more places than Proteus with it's 18" draft. And mine will put itself away on the trailer without needing to back down the ramp. That's all I'm saying for now...

On Being Transhuman

2009-02-18T22:54:00.000-08:00

Transhumanism, a definition:

DESCRIPTION OF TRANSHUMANISM

"Transhumanism" or "human enhancement" refers to an intellectual and cultural movement that advocates the use of a variety of emerging technologies. The convergence of these technologies may make it possible to take control of human evolution, providing for the enhancement of human mental and physical abilities and the amelioration of aspects of the human condition regarded as undesirable. If these enhancements become widely available, it would arguably have a more radical impact than any other development in human history—one need only reflect briefly on the economic, political, and social implications of some of the extreme enhancement possibilities. The implications for religion and the religious dimensions of human enhancement technologies are enormous and are addressed in our consultation.

That being said, here (still!) are the major dissonances that I can see with Augmenting (they refer to as "enhancement") of people:

At what point have you gone beyond "Augmentation" and into "Construction"?
This is a valid kind of question. Various organisations, notably defense forces and a few universities, have recently begun to try and answer the question of when an autonomous and seemingly intelligent machine should start being afforded rights.

Similarly, at what point along the "enhancement" progression should a person legally cease to be recognised as a "person"? Because, if there's no point along that line where a person ceases to be a person, then machines and animals are already persons, because the "technology" referred to can be as simple as grafting a few human neurons into a cow. That would lead to some serious conflicts for me eating my steak and riding my scooter up onto kerbs or across puddles, so it really needs to be sorted out.

Ameliorate? Enhance? Desirable? Undesirable?
The next sticky ground. Transhumanists say they want to "take control of human evolution, providing for the enhancement of human mental and physical abilities and the amelioration of aspects of the human condition regarded as undesirable." What precisely does that mean? As they say, they want to change the "human condition." For me, I can see the advantage of Augmenting myself with lungs that are no longer full of holes from my stupid stupid smoking habit of yesteryear, that's a definite amelioration of one of my human conditions. But where do you stop, when is it no longer a "human" condition?

Aging and dying are two aspects of the "human condition" that I bet many people would like to see "ameliorated." So does that mean that "reproductive capacity" will be similarly "ameliorated" to prevent rapid overpopulation? I know everyone is still thinking that "they" whoever they are will put "human" limits on this kind of modification, but suppose one person thinks "screw them!" and goes outside those limits anyway? Can't you just foresee the day when the world's population consists of precisely one superhuman, immortal, and very ruthless person? Who's "ameliorated" themselves all the way to that superhuman condition and then eradicated competition one by one?

Pardon? "Religious" technology?
Yeah well. I'll leave this particular piece of bullshit where it is, at the bottom of the heap. All I'm going to say is that any religion that still can't accept evolution is going to choke to death on "amelioration," let alone technology... Maybe restricted to Popes and above, but not acceptable at all in any lay circles I'd bet.

A Life Of Crime Virtually Pays For Itself.

2009-02-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. So said Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, a century ago.

Read the article in my first link and you can see one way to turn statistics to the damnedest lies. In fact, if you think about it, there's a far easier way to prove that data theft results in the most identity theft - at each haul of the net, a mugger or work colleague bent on getting your wallet and cards nets exactly one identity, whereas the phisherman brings in hundreds of thousand of personal details in one sweep. While exact figures aren't to hand, one can see about one website a month getting fleeced for several hundred thousand sets of details, plus (we are asssured) about one tenth that amount getting phished by email or web page scams, meaning at least one or more hundred thousand small thefts each month. I'd like to say that if there were that many muggings and thefts of cards reported in one month, alarm bells would have long ago sounded and we'd have seen huge press coverage of the "torrent of thefts..."

Also - if you look at those figures (and I'm being conservative) and imagine that each of those 100,000 online thefts got taken for only $20 each, you're still talking an income of $2m a month between a relatively small pool of perpetrators, maybe one or two hundred people at the most, making their "wages of sin" an average of $12,000 per month each - not a bad take-home salary, that... So you can also see why it isn't going to stop. Not when you consider that this is NOT evenly distributed, and over half those hackers and botnet herders would go home with maybe $2,000 only. *Someone* is making a packet, up near the top of this particular tree...

Is New Technology Up To Par?

2009-02-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

Are you an early adopter of technology? I've decided I'm just on the front fringe of mainstream - after all, people develop and test this kind of stuff and they ARE the real early adopters... I'll also say that I don't slavishly adopt every new technology as it comes along, but some technology just seems to cry out to be used, and used NOW! and so I end up among the first arrivals quite often, sitting around asking each other "nice, but what do we do with it?"

That's how I feel about Google Latitude (another link ) right now. It NEEDS to be used, and that fairly quickly. I wrote in a past article about GPS phones and what can be done with them, about some of the convenience that can be realised by using location awareness to advantage. There are life-saving technologies that can be implemented (read my scenario near the end of the article) if only people used geolocation properly and there was a standard besides NMEA0183 which is just a very old school way to get latitude and longitude data down a serial pipe.

So imagine my disappointment when I went to Google Latitude and entered my PC location manually, then went to Google Maps. Surprise surprise - Google Maps knows shit about my location, despite both having access to Google Gears and my location data. Pity. I fired up the petrol price tracker and - once again - it can't find its own ass with both hands and Google Maps, let alone my location so it can do something useful like find me nearby petrol prices...

Then too I have a GPS in my car but it stubbornly won't reveal a location to my cellphone or laptop or PDA - it's a walled garden, an island, a stand-alone. Same with the GPS module I've painstakingly cobbled together out of the guts of a GPS enabled device, a serial to USB dongle, and seemingly miles of wires and cable. It gets as far as the laptop, and languishes there.

Isn't it time this changed? I think it should, and soon. I'll soon be posting an article that I hope will generate a lot of discussion, but it's a bit controversial and I'm still working on it.

Do Packbots Dream Electric IEDs?

2009-02-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

Last week in this post I said that robot and cyborg ethics are suddenly becoming a big issue - and now, for your enjoyment, here's the debate about whether or not killer bots in the field need to have a Bill Of Rights...

Until these robots can perceive damage as "pain," and until they are given a sense of "self-awareness" (as in "That's *me* that's *hurting* and in danger of *death* there!") then I don't think they are more than a finely-honed tool, no different to the electronics in modern vehicles that keep the vehicle running, perform diagnostics, and scan for and possibly react to their surroundings in a limited way.

As such, they should be entitled to the same kind of consideration you give to your car, your refrigerator, and a range of robotic toys - harming them for harm's sake is just not productive nor is it a very human thing for you to do, and you're basically hurting yourself and people (and kids) around you more than you're "hurting" them. Try and save the duco, don't let them run out of oil, and operate them safely. (Well, safely for your own soldiers and civilians, at any rate...)

But who knows, maybe the Defense Dept's are way ahead of us and there are actually biological brains inside those clever UAVs and Packbots...

Tickle Me Cyborg

2009-01-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

It noticed that an energy converter was producing an excess of acid, and since replacement parts were unobtainable, settled for a daily regime of chemicals designed to reduce the production of acid. When the autofocus went out, clip-on external correction lenses were obtained and fitted. It wasn't sure if it was still the machine it was when it rolled out of the chute. And I'm still not. I use artificial chemical and mechanical means to keep my body functioning, and I'm not sure if that makes me a human with augmentation, a cyborg, or what.

I've been chewing at this particular knot for years on this blog. Say I get a prosthetic arm? Am I a cyborg then? What about two mechanical arms and tank tracks to replace the legs? Or if I get a chip implanted in my brain to prevent spasms or give me relief from pain or suppress homicidal or deviantly sexual behaviour? At what point do you say this human is human no longer? Where is the point at which you say that this machine is now sentient and entitled to the same protection as any other sentient being?

Here I was trying to establish a morals and ethics precedent, thinking that people would not care about machines and say that I was overthinking things wayyyyyyyyyy too much. And then, this. Turns out all you have to do is set fire to an Elmo plushie to get backyard philosophers climbing out of the woodwork...

Free Versions Of Software!

2009-01-22T16:12:00.000-08:00

There's a site that calls itself Last Freeware Version and that's what it specialises in - Listing the last known free version of whatever software you're after. From the site's text, it seems it goes for the adware spyware nagware free versions where possible, and you might do worse than add this bookmark to your arsenal of software-snaffling sites...

I like that I can equip a PC pretty much completely with free versions of popular software, it means that any relatives' PCs I get called to fix because it "won't open this Word file" (when it doesn't have Microsoft Office installed) is now just a case of going to LFV and hunting down a freebie to do it. No more cudgeling my brain to remember names. Well, okay - it doesn't have a freeware Office but it does have a lot of up-to-date freeware.

Basic Engagement Survey

2009-01-20T21:01:00.000-08:00

Quick - survey! Please pop over to SurveyMonkey and take the three minutes to let me know what you think!

60's - 70's Personal Music Players

2009-01-13T05:35:00.000-08:00

Ive just been given a piece of ancient technology, a Kriesler radiogram. Coming from an era when music came in tons not bytes, here's a picture of the beast for all the iPod generation out there:

Radiogram is a portmanteau word made from radio and phonograph (or phonogram) and they did two things, AM radio and playing vinyl records. This particular stereo would have rocked for its time, as it had a jack for a microphone (and the microphone for this one is missing) and one of those high tech tape recorder things as well. Generally that was a reel to reel 1/4" tape deck. And it had terminals on the back to add external speakers.

Most radiograms used valve technology, and even speakers back then were a bit different. It shows in the resulting sound, which makes valve amplifiers still sought after for audiophiles today. I'll be interested to see if I can get the turntable working well enough to play my mountain of old vinyl, maybe rip some of it to MP3 so I can listen to it in the car.

Anyhow - I'm refurbishing this particular one bit by bit, and will post pics to my Flickr account as I do things. I'll try and keep up a few articles on the blog too, and when I get it going I think a few video/audio snippets will make their way online too.

Unnatural Selection?

2009-01-11T23:26:00.000-08:00

Time for natural selection, I think... Let those who can do more than one thing at a time, do it. Look, I have used a mobile phone while driving, for years now. Right from the first old analog phones, I was always wishing I could afford the hands-free headset option, and generally, I bought one.

It makes sense, doesn't it? You need both hands and both feet to control your vehicle. Until vehicle manufacturers get wise and start making smarter cars, we're stuck with a fine exercise in coordination, and to add holding a cellphone to the mix defies sanity, to my way of thinking. Using a hands-free device is pretty much a cast in stone requirement, to me.

And I see so many people with a little bluetooth bug in their ear when I drive around the city. And wouldn't you know it? Half of them are texting...

So I say let natural selection take its course. Eventually we'll be rid of the stupid stupid people for whom lawmakers have to make nanny-state laws...

Converdgets

2009-01-07T23:51:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: More converged gadgetry...

Anyone wondering what you'll be using to get your Internet fix in a few years' time? I've been watching developments, and I see all these convergence trends. Steve Ballmer says there are "three screens" and Microsoft is focusing on being on all of them, the mobile phone, the TV, and the PC. But he's lumping PCs and laptops and PDAs together under the heading "PC," which isn't quite right.

I have a music player, which is quite smart, and has a screen. But it didn't lock up on New Year's Eve, because it's not a Microsoft POS Zune. I have a GPS which is running some form of Linux and has a screen. And I use VNC and Synergy routinely to access servers and other devices running other operating systems. And many of those servers are sporting a little screen which is run by something in the machine BIOS...

Logitech and others are showing off gorgeous keyboards with a screen on them - and that's another device which is getting a screen. Laptop makers are seeing a need to put an extra screen on their flagship lappies, thus turning their portable laptop back into a desktop unit with limited luggability. (I'm calling these things by the horrible portmanteau name of "converdgets," until I think of a better name for them.)

The manufacturers are doing these sorts of things because we like the convenience, we're basically lazy, if we can get an extra screen instead of having to switch windows, we're all for it. And we like the "gee whiz!" factor, let's be honest.

Expect to see a lot more convergdgets in the next few years, and I reckon we'll see many of them (or their predecessors) appear this year as manufacturers realise that we're lazy and gadget-hungry... %)

Sign Of Limited Usefulness...

2009-01-06T21:03:00.000-08:00

I love a good idea, and at first glance this seems like an excellent idea. You have a place to type input, and then it demonstrates the sign language equivalent. See, I know about half the letters of the alphabet in ASL, because I've never seriously had to communicate with a profoundly deaf person. Now, of course, I can type in the word, see the video, and then make the corresponding sign.

Or - I can just let the deaf person watch the move played out on the video scree.... Oh. Wait!

Why don't I just type the words on the screen and let the deaf person read them? Yeah, I was kinda wondering that myself...

Can't come to work - I've caught "I Love You" virus...

2008-12-25T16:10:00.000-08:00

Not sure if this find should go in here or the Zencookbook blog - but decided after a bit of head-scratching that it belongs here. Yes, there's all kinds of threats to the environment, but there's also all kinds of benefits if one of these biohackers pulls off a particularly imaginative hack.

More interesting to me is how more and more technology is being lateralised, made available to anyone. As far as I can see, this is the way it's meant to be and has been for millenia. Telescopes weren't sequestered away and kept for "astonomers," what happened was that people made themselves telescopes, used them, and then called themselves astronomers.

Similarly, the largest and earliest impetuses in each field have come not from some enclave of "official" scientists working under some kind of "official" sanction - they've come from the people who thought to themselves "hey - I can do that!" and then did. Charles Darwin was a minister's son and only became recognised for his work on evolutionary adaptation AFTER he did the work. Leeuwenhoek didn't study optics - there was no official curriculum in optics at that stage - he created advances in the field and helped to formalise it as the field of optics, and he used what he created to make advances in microbiology, which is the thing he is more famous for. All without a formal "official" education beyond basic schooling...

Some of our best advances in programming and electronic communication have come not from the "official" Internet Engineering Task Force and their directed research but from home hobbyists and self-confessed computer geeks and hackers. We wouldn't have effortless web browsing today if not for individual efforts and ideas developed by individuals and small groups of "non-official" computer geeks.

All right - I mentioned "hackers" back there. By now, a few of you will be backing up and going "ooh! He said 'hackers,' he did!" and you'd be right to stop there. The dangers of some dickhead producing a real-life "virus" in a meth-lab-like basement laboratory is real and present. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see one coming out in 2009. But also note that just as we had hackers, so we also have security minded people, who developed "antidotes" to the malware.

And while it looks like the spammers are winning, remember that there's a financial advantage to taking over computers and hacking - there is little financial advantage to killing the world's population. Also, believe me when I say that anything, the most horrific things, that you can imagine are already being tried and tested in labs that hide behind barbed wire in underground bunkers, in countries all over the world... Having as many facilities out there as possible in the public domain represents our best chance of someone with the knowledge and facilities to develop antidotes remaining alive out there...

Also - notice how computers and the Internet, which not so long ago were the esoteric realm of a relative few hobbyists and professionals, have now become everyday technology and in fact this is the enabling force behind the biohacking hobby now springing up. Looking at the timeframe that led from physics and electricity as "official" fields, to electronics, communications, and then computers and Internet, you can see that once the knowledge was easily disseminated (via BBS's and early Internet) how exponentially the body of knowledge and achievements grew. Now bear in mind that biology and modern allopathic medicine have been around for about the same amount of time, and huge amounts of information are coming online even as you read this.

So - don't waste your time trying to preserve "official ivory tower" desmesnes for the field, and instead start planning task forces and security forces to keep abreast of this new tsunami of biological innovations. Haven't we learned anything from the progression from Brain virus to zombie farms?

Have an evolutionary Christmas!

2008-12-24T14:47:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas! While I was sitting here waiting for my Christmas day to ramp up, I looked over an old article I'd saved from over a year ago. Back then it didn't have this finding to round it out, but it still had the concept of a biological cause for religious experience down to a T. The article is a good grounder in the whole matter, despite that it needs to be as long as it is to cover the subject. Make the effort because it is worth it.

The question of why we feel religion (and superstition, mystical feelings, etc) is still a strange one even when you know that there's a bit of the brain that you can slow down the activity of and get an instant religious experience.

There's much debate about whether it's an evolutionary step or a byproduct of an evolutionary step, but I posit my theory that religion serves as a unifying force, a way to meld a culture together. Religion may simply achieve that, and pretty much nothing else. We (as biological creatures) notice that when "we" aren't as much in evidence inside our heads, we get an elated feeling, a reward. We also notice that when we're in a large group, the "I" tends to go away in favour of the group. And we get that reward feeling again. Together, the feeling seems to say, is how we should be.

Maybe that's the feeling social animals like ants and bees and sheep get all the time. For them too, the aggregatory behaviour is an evolutionary bonus - large groups are more survival-oriented. When they leave the safety of the herd, the sense of self stirs, and to a herd animal that would probably feel very negative and unfamiliar.

And I'd dare say that for humankind, too, groups were better than individuals. Only in our case, our brain wasn't wired as a mob-dweller brain, it was wired as a solitary organism brain, and in our case depression of the ego produced a reward feeling.

Perhaps the right parietal lobe is a leftover from earlier days, or a mutation that proved advantageous - either way, we gained an extra personality from it.

And either way, it's no wonder we're such troubled creatures, with so many conflicting imperatives in our brains, we're probably glad to blame things on an entity called "God" or "Luck" or "Fate" or whatever. But look on the bright side - because of that evolutionary kink, we get several holidays a year, Christmas included...

Which brings me back to Merry Christmas again...

Pssst! Can I interest ya in a re-con heart guv'nor?

2008-12-22T04:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/22/canadian_lung_bubble/ reconditioned lungs are cool - there is yet hope that I won't be pushing up daisies before my 60th. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends, I guess. I'll try and hold on until they get really really good at doing it. %)

And of course, the future will hold a lot of things of interest to sufferers of other organ failures - imagine being able to get a heart with the embolism removed and healed ex vivo, then used to replace a totally failing heart. At the exponential rate we're making advances, that will all happen around 11PM on Christmas Day or maybe the wee small hours of Boxing Day...

Gone - The Golden Age Of Great Genius? Maybe Not.

2008-12-05T16:56:00.000-08:00

A recent Yahoo article poses the question of whether Einstein was the last great genius , citing the formation of large institutions as making it harder for individuals to make "stroke of genius" advances. Me, I'm not so sure the great geniuses have vanished. I think they've just moved to those large institutions.

If I had the choice of living on the bones of my arse with a laboratory made of collected scrap plumbing and the machinery from the old closed-down chip factory up the road, or living on a government grant, with a salary, a lab full of modern equipment, and half a dozen colleagues to bounce my ideas off, I know for sure it wouldn't take me a flash of genius to work out where I'd rather be....

I also say that except for a few rare individuals who work better in solitude, having a "support network" of colleagues is better for the creative process, so our geniuses these days are more likely to be found in collectives of very talented individuals. That would tend to make them stand out a bit less, which might also give the impression that we're all out of genius.

Most of those solitary geniuses came out of a vastly different educational system, one less geared towards churning out average students and more likely to foster individualism. That's not to say that genius can only flourish under such an educational system, of course. If there's one thing we know about human spirit and intellect, it's that it will express itself under any conditions. But the individual expressing it may these days be less averse to company than their counterparts under the less socialising system.

And of course, there may well be countless thousands of very intelligent people bordering on genius - but with today's surfeit of communications and magazines and peer reviews and blogs and websites and TV spots, they may well be singing in the wilderness for all the notice the world is taking of them, and their light shall, indeed, be hidden beneath bushels...

Advances? Not Just Now.

2008-11-25T06:56:00.000-08:00

Just been poking around the tech news, still using "opportunistic wifi" as my connection. So first of all I'm disillusioned because Telstra have taken over a week to get an existing telephone line connected, and now Amcom are going to take another week, perhaps two, to get ADSL flowing over that (finally!) connected line. And then, it's going to be ADSL1, not that that matters because my supposed ADSL2+ connection in Perth was worse than dial-up at times. And speaking of dial-up, I tried using the dial-up number Amcom provided as a temporary measure until they get my broadband connected - and it's about the same as using acoustic couplers over a tin can telephone.

So I can probably be excused for thinking that technology is going backwards. But reading all the usually jam-packed tech news sites, I'm seeing a kind of hiatus here. We're well and truly overdue for a quantum leap in some web or internet technology or other, and also a new bit of tech gear that isn't just an Android or iPhone or a new social aggregator site.

Something pretty groundbreaking has to appear before Christmas, you mark my words. A new internet paradigm, some fundamental scientific discovery, or a piece or hardware. (Or other techo item like an electric car or renewable energy source) That will restore my faith in our ingenuity and sheer inventiveness, nothing less.

So I'm holding my breath and awaiting results. What will happen first, my broadband connection actually working or some breakthrough? As the tagline for my old BBS used to run: "TEdLIVISION! - don't touch that dial!"

Second Loot And Virtual Grids

2008-11-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've been a player in Second Life, the wildly remunerative virtual world. Remunerative, that is, if you're Linden Research, the company which developed it and now operates it. I have to say it was a very immersive experience but ultimately it's priced itself out of my desire. It's a work in beta, or even trailing edge alpha at times, yet Linden Research has the balls to charge for it, and continuously raise prices. I say good on them, but it's not exactly the way the web was won... And it has fuelled a lot of protest and controversy in-world, which is not to their advantage.

Because the truth is, that there are other VR projects out there, such as OSGrid and OpenLife, which operate in the same way as SL, and are substantially cheaper or free, and some of them allow you to run your own simulator server.

See, the dirty secret Linden Labs are holding close to their chest is that grids (which is the infrastructure on which simulator servers run) are not, by nature, closed. And they are not difficult to run. A brief history of the World Wide Web might be in order...

When the Internet first wobbled into public view, there were servers for a variety of functions, generally it wasn't simple to get these online and running, and the WWW developed out of a desire to simplify the end user experience for everyone. First Web servers were also a slightly difficult beast to run, most people did not have the bandwidth to run one from home even if they could, and the idea of websites was still rudimentary.

Then larger organisations came onto the scene and allowed anyone to build a few web pages (think Angelfire, GeoCities) and other organisations began hosting more complex websites in return for money. But it was and is still possible to run a web server on your PC at home or pay for a server in some hosting installation and host other people's websites.

That's the point that Virtual Reality is at right now. Linden Labs allows you to host your "virtual website" - in other words, what they refer to as a "simulator" - and build your site there. OpenLife does something similar but with less cost, and OSGrid provides you with a framework in which to connect your server to a bunch of others so that there is connectivity between them all.

And with some of the older generation not being able to find their way off AOL, virtual reality could actually become a new paradigm that will hopefully soon take over the web - instead of a website, how about owning a block of virtual land? Then it's just a matter of walking from site to site. This is much easier than remembering a URL.

And, of course, one of the primary problems Second Life is experiencing is allayed if not eliminated by opening a grid to multiple privately operated servers. SL has many many problems because it is trying to juggle terabytes of data around between their machines. This process often ends with databases scrambled - and then the "residents" of SL complain about losing virtual items, not being able to move between virtual locations, not being able to login, etc.

Part of the reason Linden Labs do it this way is technical, the rest is purely commercial. The technical reason is simply that they can preserve your "assets" as you go from one simulation to the next. It's not required.

Think about when you shop online: You log into a shopping site, fill your "virtual shopping basket" with what you want, proceed to the "checkout," pay for your items, and leave the website. Your "assets" on the site were what you had in your basket, the details you provided to pay for those items, and the receipt, which has been emailed to you so it's a permanent record.

When you leave that site, do those "assets" travel with you? No no a thousand times no! Web workers put in a lot of hours to prevent precisely that kind of thing. The "permanent" things you have are held on another server - your Paypal account, for example, or your credit card connection to your bank's network. And the rest is either in cookies which your browser stores for you, or abandoned when you leave the website.

Similarly, LL argue that by closing their grid and keeping all data together, it means that you will see all the public assets (buildings, scenery, objects, etc) when you travel from one simulation to the next. It's a lovely argument but totally crap. Because, when you open a website in your web browser, do you need to refer to some central repository before you can view images, for example? No - these "assets" are served up by the web server as you connect. Similarly, by keeping local assets local in a virtual reality simulator, you remove the need for a HUGE database juggling terabytes and spread that load among the individual servers.

Hence, I'm thinking that VR will become more and more commonplace as people realise how much easier it is to present information in such environments, how much easier it is for the users to find that information, in a properly designed simulation, and how much easier it is for a user to find their way between VR sites if they become a bit more website-like in their ubiquity.

And I'm a huge supporter of open sourcing things - if you let a team of developers loose on a project, they will end up like Second Life - more and more new features coming out, more and more justification for price rises, and none of the scutwork, such as fixing potentially show-stopping bugs, getting done. If you let open-sourcers loose on this kind of project, there will be a similar rush of new features, but the bugs, being extremely irritating, will get cleaned up along the way, leading to a much nicer user experience in the end.

Look at Linux - started out as an open source replacement for a machine operating system that only alpha geeks used, and is now as simple to operate as the competition's systems. Look at Apache webservers - started out as an open source web server that was complex and unforgiving, and now installs regularly and easily on a huge range of machines at a mouse click.

So start flocking to the alternatives, and show your support by donating to them, assisting them, and maybe even contributing something to the development. Before you know it, Linden Labs won't be the only game in town...

WMML

2008-10-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

What Makes Me Laugh... Reviewing an Attenborough doco, listening to David enthusing about another creature "perfectly adapted to its environment," that's what. All creatures great and small show compromise, there's not one "perfect adaptation" because if there was such, that creature would take over the environment.

What we understand of the selection and adaptation process, we know depends on the inherent flaws of the system, starting with the semirandom mutations of the DNA. Every system has parts with flaws, and every other system that can take advantage of those flaws, will. It seems like the eventual aim of natural selection is to produce a biological equivalent of "grey goo" that will just coat the Earth in a thin layer, one organism.

So when there's a new niche in the "e-ecosystem," it's not surprising to find that an organism has started to explore it and try and make a living at it. Which is pretty much what you're seeing here, in this article. It's a wide open ecosystem, it can and does provide money and goods if approached right, and therefore equips anyone able to operate here to better survive, without needing skills like checkout operator at fast food stores, office clerking skills, or any other such.

It's gainful, if not legal, employment. Being a banger or a burglar are also gainful, if not legal. There's a niche - taking your stuff, your money - and some organisms (burglars) take it by one means, other organisms (banking and financial institutions) take it by more acceptable means.

The important thing to note is that you're the niche, the burglar and bank are the exploiting organisms. Similarly, your money and your personal data (and therefore, access to your money held by the banks) are now a niche online, and getting exploited. It's survival of the fittest, now it's up to you to shore up defenses and repel the skript kiddies.

Here's Why Speedometers Do That

2008-10-21T06:34:00.000-07:00

Why Do Speedometers Go To 160MPH? According to that article, they don't actually know, but they agree that it leads to the psychological itch to go that bit faster. In one way, the coming of digital speedometers has to some extent shown old dial type speedos to be the bullshit that they are and thus are solving one issue.

But for my money? The clue's in the "needle's only half way" remark. We like to think our machines have some reserve over and above our requirements. Yes, we have drivers who are only happy when the needles on all the gauges are hovering partway into the red, and they who push that envelope are our race car drivers. (Or our hoon drivers, if they didn't luck into a racing career.)

But for the rest of us, the sense of security we get from driving along with "plenty in reserve" is what sells those cars with the 220kph speedos. (Amusingly enough, if you push the average car to the valve-bending limit they will top out around 150kph, and then the various engine parts end up making pretty patterns on the road behind you. We're such suckers...)

Also, of course, there's no way a car manufacturer wants to see the speedo needle hitting the end stop. So even though 140kph is realistic, they will add that extra 80 just to make sure you won't ever "wrap the needle." The next model will get that fast, buddy, you betcha. Just buy it when we release it okay?

Also, all that unused range on the dial makes sure we cling to the speed limit or just over. Despite knowing that every millimeter we depress that pedal is another half a litre per 100km. So in a lot of ways, cars with dial type speedos have contributed to deaths, pollution, and the cost of constantly replacing your car with the next model.

And here comes my "personal responsibility" homily, yeah yeah... See, the reason car manufacturers do those sorts of things is simple. It's because they work. You and I and everyone else that buys a car and is swayed by the horsepower and top speed, have contributed to this.

At least we're now pushing for greener cars and thinking about driving a bit slower - aren't we?

Use Traffic Lights To MANAGE Traffic.

2008-10-19T17:31:00.000-07:00

Okay - all you city planning authorities out there, looking for ways to green your cities and reduce pollution, reduce congestion, and make life easier for your citizens. Lissen up, I have a thought for you.

I suggested, years ago, that a lot of traffic congestion could be reduced by designing the bigger better traffic light set. Once again, the Most Abject Pathetic Technology & Electronics Kompany I worked for looked at me as though I'd sprouted three legs and an extra head when I suggested it, and once more, this is an idea well worth taking on board when you next send out a tender for replacing traffic lights.

It isn't hard, these days, to separate a video image into frames, and search each frame for salient features. Such as "outline of a car," "outline of a motorcycle," and so forth. Any reasonable computer can do this with ease. Said reasonable computer can also compare one frame with a subsequent frame, and over a few frames, average the speed of all those detected salient features, as well as maintain a tally of how many such features are in frame.

So if you aim a camera back across the traffic lights at the oncoming traffic, the computer can tell how much traffic it has coming in, how fast that traffic is moving, and how much traffic has flowed in that direction for the last 24 hours.

Now suppose you have four such systems at each intersection, controlling the flow of traffic. It doesn't matter what time of day it is, the traffic lights react to the existing stream of traffic and try and schedule so that the least cumulative amount of time is spent idling at the lights in all directions.

That move alone could reduce fuel use and pollution from idling at lights to insignificant amounts. Since it takes a lot of energy to get rolling again once stopped, reducing the amount of times a vehicle has to stop makes an immense difference. This is also true for electric vehicles (EVs) because they chew huge amounts of juice to start rolling again.

As a bonus, if there is a traffic stream (or single vehicle) approaching the controlled lights at a speed exceeding the speed limit, you can always provide a red light to them. Then if they pass through the lights despite that, you have a picture of them running a red light, and also their speed at the time... %)

One last thought - if you don't want to waste the computing power needed for parsing images, perhaps you could respectfully ask car and immobiliser manufacturers to start placing a small piece of technology in their product - a Bluetooth beacon... You could count the number of BT beacons at traffic lights just as easily as images, you'd lose the ability to enforce speed limits and the red light camera facilities, but it would simplify things a bit.

If you like my idea and decide to use it, feel free to. But please also feel free to donate some money via my Paypal link so that I can continue to come up with new ideas...

Few more details on the Joule.

2008-10-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

A week ago I wrote about the newly-unveiled prototype of the Joule, a vehicle by South African company Optimal Energy and I was a bit short for details.

The vehicle is claimed to be capable of around 200km range on a single battery pack and 400km on dual battery pack. That's quite a useable range. All in all, it makes the Joule sound like a very useful and serviceable vehicle.

One quibble, you don't pay for the battery packs apparently - you lease them from Optimal. If they just mean you lease the batteries and can then charge them yourself, that is fine. They specifically mention a seven year lifespan for the batteries, as though you will retain lesseeship of them for the whole seven years.

But there's another alternative, one that needs to be clarified by Joule PR - what if they are just commenting in general that battery packs will last for seven years, but that their "lease" scheme means that you drive until the battery pack is flat, and then need to swap the battery pack for another "leased" battery pack?
I.e. they won't give you a Joule with a battery you own for seven years plus a charging cord, but rather it's like the "swap" system in use for propane gas bottles. In this latter case, unless Joule has an outlet at every service station, the usefulness of the Joule would approach zero really quickly. Because I seriously doubt Optimal Energy has that good an infrastructure in place.

So there's the battery to consider, and also, that kind of range comes at a price, which is top speed - the Joule is claimed to top out at "83mph," for whatever reasons. It seems strange that they mention the odd 3 miles per hout, as though they have been straining all systems to get to that speed, like downhill with a tailwind... Or it may be to give you inchworm-like 3mph awesome overtaking speed at 80.

Either way, I would not rely on a Joule to take me out in the country, which means EVs are not flexible enough yet. That said, I still think the Joule is a commendable effort, and if they were available and I was able to afford a new car, the Joule would, at this stage, probably be it.

A HUGE Thank You To All!

2008-10-17T22:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who passed the link to that previous article out, I noticed a spike for the day, and hopefully it has reached, or will now reach, the eyes of someone with the necessary vision and resources to make it happen. I tried to start things locally, but it's hard because this takes resources which no-one I know has.

*fingers crossed*

Want To Sell Something Other Than Cars?

2008-10-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

Since I've just badly taken the mickey out of the so-called "designers" of solar and electric vehicles, I herewith present my positive contribution to the matter of EVs and SEVs.

Just think... Why exactly are you re-inventing the wheel, automotive, EV, and SEV designers? What is it that people all over the world are wanting?

They want to be reassured that whatever they purchase next, it will not be as damaging to the environment as past efforts have been.
They want to stop hurting in the pocketbook, getting gouged ever more and more money for less and less of Point 1 above.
They want to see the difference in their bank book, in the air around their suburb, and around the world.
They don't necessarily want to give up their cars and conveniences for it.
It shouldn't look like a golf buggy that smashed into a pyramid and got bred to a flying saucer. People aren't ready for the Jetsons Age just yet.

And as it turns out, there is a solution!

First of all, car manufacturers must realise that there has been a degree of culpability for the current crisis. Pushing people to buy car after car after car, model after model, year after year - that has not really worked out all that well, has it? Secondly, car owners holding on to old fossil fuel technology is not a desirable outcome either. Yes it would mean less cars need to be produced and thus save all that impact on the environment - but the older tech creates a pollution problem of its own...

So what you want is for people not to buy your latest greatest car the minute it hits showroom floors, meaning a massive scaleback in automobile production. But you don't want them driving 15 year old smogblowers, either. And you definitely want to keep making money. What to do, what to do?

Turns out, you have already made a market for yourselves. In the last 20 years, front-wheel drive vehicles have become more and more common, as we realised that turning a tailshaft and rear differential was less efficient than putting all those components in the front. Handling was affected, but it made for a cheaper manufacturing process because smaller engines could be used. Engine computers also got more power out of those smaller engines. Another saving.

The next thing that has jumped is the technology of batteries. Currently (no pun intended) there are some fairly light and robust batteries out there, and soon there will be carbon nanotube supercapacitors that will dance rings around present state of the art.

Oh yes - and solar panels can actually be printed onto things now, cheaply and easily. And motors and drive circuits can become very very very cheap and efficient.

And there you have your perfect market, the perfect way to be green, keep your cars on the road longer and with less pollution, and still have a product to sell:

You know how the computer is programmed in your front wheel drive small car. You can put an aftermarket kit together, comprising a control unit that interfaces to the engine computer, a solar panel that fits to the roof, a set of batteries that fit under the back seat, and two new rear wheel hubs that have electric motors in them.

Now your front wheel drive small car can suddenly use less fuel, produce less pollution, and cost your customers less to run. They still buy the kit, but many governments give a rebate for putting solar and electric power on cars so they don't face a huge cost. Handling improves because a smart controller will assist the driver with the electric motors, making the cars safer. You as a car manufacturer have a new product, and it will sell like hotcakes so you'll make up in volume for the sales of new vehicles you'll miss.

Don't think it would work? No-one would be interested in an aftermarket kit that reduces running costs? Just look at the mad scramble to fit gas conversion kits to cars. The only thing is that car manufacturers lost control of the retrofit side of things, to freelancers. But the need to intimately tie the electric drives to the car computers will give you a head start and effectively let you control this particular upgrade.

If you like my idea and decide to use it, feel free to. But please also feel free to donate some money via my Paypal link so that I can continue to come up with new ideas...

The Android Kill Switch And You.

2008-10-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

Android android android! Apple brick, Apple wossname, Apple cinema! I think what really shits me to tears about the techie and gadget blogs is that they seem to ALL chew the same things into a tasteless mush. Once you've heard for the fiftieth time that some tech company has been rumoured to say that the idea of a new tetris-playing left handed toilet roll holder that uses Linux and dispenses via SMS messages is not completely stupid so they must be about to release one - well, when you get that same crap served up for the 50th time without a single original or extraneous thought, you just want to vomit a little bit, then smash your computer and never use another one as long as you live...

As it has been with this - the nefarious Android Kill switch ... I mean, come on! Yes Apple did this and caused a shitstorm, and yes it's a bit shitty of Google to do this, but... hey... Are you guys hearing yourselves? How hard was it to jailbreak an iPhone? A closed source operating system? So how long before the first kill switch killer appears, given this is open source?

Get over yourselves you boring little sensationalists...

....

How to Open OpenID?

2008-10-16T00:57:00.000-07:00

A blog post not so far in the past - I basically had the same kind of evaluation of OpenID - it is a good system b0rked by useability and trust issues. As far as I'm concerned, I'm done bitching about OpenID and will not use it unless it's unavoidable, or unless its useability improves markedly. Meanwhile, I've got a suggestion to make:

How about keeping a personal ID registry someplace - just as ICANN keeps domain contact info and domain info already? Put it on the existing domain name infrastructure, you can then get on the Internet as an anonymous mug user who has to use usernames and passwords at every site, and if you want a common ID you contact them and pay for your screen name just as domain owners pay for a domain.

You would use an RSA active key synced to the root servers or to your local server, and that pretty much identifies you. Even a USB key based one that sends a keep-alive to the server on a regular basis, that way you don't even have to log out - just take your key with you and that's it - logged out of the machine, the websites, everything.

Yes, you lose your anonymity but come on - with several million surveillance cameras, your driver's license, social security and tax file numbers, bank accounts, etc - how much privacy do you delude yourself you currently have? Get used to it... As far as I'm concerned the advantages of this would outweigh any potential to lose more privacy than I already have lost.

Yes - the RSA keys will cost - but on the order of dollars, not hundreds of dollars. And yes, they are easy to lose - but (l)users will soon learn to have a bit of respect if they have to pay to re-register a new nickname and buy a new key every time they do something stupid...

And yes - there are hundreds - if not thousands - of spam and fake domains in operation despite the checking of namespaces, I agree. But that's a quite a few orders of magnitude less than there are zombie machines on the 'net today that would be totally boned if the USB key was removed at the end of the user's session and thus cuts all legitimate communications between that machine and the Internet.

There are totally bogus names and details in the domain contacts list, too. Yep, I'll totally agree. But they do function as an identity - they evaluate to one user somewhere out there in meatspace, and that's really all we want here, isn't it?

Is That A Person, A Chimp, Or A Robot?

2008-10-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

What rights does a robot have? This isn't much important right now, I guess, because lets face it, our current robots don't do much more than blow themselves up disarming IEDs or getting themselves shot at to save having that happen to soldiers, or they sweep our rooms, or they dance cute little dances and play soccer.

The problem is that some people with artificial limbs have a better robotic limb than most robots have got. And the line is gonna blur, very fast. And before you know it, a machine with nothing more than a human's brain in it will be pushing the boundary and asking the Millenium Man question...

Trouble is, we're already in trouble before we get to robots. Primates and large apes are being considered for actually being "people" - and that on grounds that are going to open a whole lot more doors... They are being described as having all the requirements to be considered "people," such as self awareness, using appropriate forms of communication to each situation, tool use, and more.

Trouble is, by that standard there are other species such as elephants, crows, and dozens more - and they would also all come within their whiskers of the same definitions. They are self aware, have cultures passed on within social groups, use tools to accomplish tasks, use appropriate communication methods, have rudimentary "languages" to pass information.

Now to another consideration - we can take an animal, mess with its genetics, and produce a tiny organic robot, a machine designed to do just one or two specialised tasks. Is THAT a robot, an animal, or a person?

The further you dig, the deeper you get in. Suppose I had contact lenses, an artificial heart, prosthetic arms and legs, a plate in my skull, and used a steady flow of chemicals to manage things like immune rejection, digestive timing, infection, and whatever else. Am I still human? I'll tell you I am. If you somehow managed to upload my brain and personality into a small supercomputer, it too would tell you it was human.

So scuse me for bringing it up, but someone has to. Because, at the rate technology keeps leapfrogging, the moment when a human brain in a mechanical body modeled on a chimp will show up in the news and demand an answer to this question...

Added FeedBlitz

2008-10-14T01:33:00.000-07:00

Hey all - I've put all the blogs together on FeedBlitz if anyone wants email delivery of all articles on all blogs nightly. You can go to http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Sub=245899 to subscribe, the feed for all the blogs seems to vary between 5 a day all up to maybe 2 a week sometimes. All depends if I have access to the Internet, have time, and if there is interesting stuff going on in the world.

The blogs in the FeedBlitz email are:

TEdALOG Lite - General commentary, bullshit, yarn spinning, and what have you. I enjoy seeing such articles, and I enjoy writing them. I hope you also will enjoy them.
TEdADYNE Systems - Cyborg Ethics - with technology and our bodies seemingly destined to get mingled, what are going to be ethical questions we face, what technology is around to make it happen now? Also, ideas for IT and technology - I tend to have quite a few...
Zencookbook Blog - Anything that's eco friendly, green, good for your body - this blog is a companion to the book. Some ideas for sustainable living, occasional DIY projects that will save your money or your environment or both, and links to great green ideas out there.
TEdAMENU Tuckertime - Recipes I've developed, tried out, or enjoyed. Generally healthy-ish and very varied. Some of them fit into the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook range, they will usually have a list of active constituents at the foot of the recipe.

You can also go to The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook site. It's not a blog though (not yet, at any rate!) so it stays pretty static. That said, I will be updating that site over the next few months though.

Please refer anyone you think might benefit from these sites - the ideas may well be just what some business has been looking for - in which case they are welcome to use them, if they will only attribute them to the right person, i.e. me. Recipes for healthy easy meals - you're more than welcome to them. A neat project for yourt home or garden that will save power, or water, or money? Take the article and have fun! And everyone can do with a laugh in their lives - so if TEdALOG Lite made you grin, I feel happy too.

Clever! Why Didn't The Aliens Think Of This?

2008-10-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

... oh wait ...

Umm we thought of it! It's funny, we have robot explorers on Mars looking for water and signs of life, but are we even sure what we'd be looking for? I mean, maybe the Mars explorers have already run over something, maybe the spacecraft up there have already seen those elusive signs. I mean - yeah, we could "land" an explorer on Earth and we'd see pretty obvious things like trees and ants. But A) there are areas on Earth where a robot like a Mars explorer wouldn't see a single sign that something is alive on Earth. And B) what about looking from up in space, a few million miles away? Would we know a sign of life if it bit the satellite in the exhausts?

Luckily, we're now a lot closer to finding out the answer to one of those things.

THE Breakthrough Killer App For GPS Phones - For FREE!

2008-10-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

There's this concept for phones at the moment, that the developers say will allow you to see areas not directly visible to you. The article is written in a slightly feverish puerile tone to make you think of peering through the walls of the ladies' room. Big deal, really. They're missing the two most important developments here.

One: (which I covered in brief in this previous post ) details a concept much like the above already, which would provide "balloon help" of the form of social tags people placed, using their mobile phones, at specific GPS locations. I said I'd pushed for the development of such a system four - five years ago at a particularly unimaginative and (as it turns out) loser company, but with added features. More on this in a moment.

Two: Which my previous post also sort of covered, is the use of images, not just text tags.

Please note that from here on, I'm doing it again - I'm revealing an idea that, had said previous employer taken the development on, would have meant they had a three year headstart on the competition, and if a cellphone or software development company were to take it on now, it would put them a year, maybe three, ahead of their competitors even now. It's an edge.

And the idea that I had, and which is still applicable, is the leveraging the use of crowds, as all the best apps do, to provide rich content, which is what sells your application to consumers, for minimal cost - which is what sells the application to your accountants...

Take a device that's capable of geolocation, such as a GPS enabled phone or PDA. Now make sure it has a camera on it as well. That's all the end user needs.

Now take a server side software that can accept photos from those devices, which are tagged with GPS information, and pass them through a photo stitch process and can use salient features in the images to decide where to stitch, then use other GPS tagged photos (taken from slightly different locations) to figure out the orientation of the photo stitch, and each photo that composes the stitch.

You see the point? I can now take a photo, the server compares it to existing pictures in my location as given y my GPS, and from that it figures out what direction I'm facing, what azimuth and elevation the camera was at. No need for accelerometers and compasses.

In fact, the server can probably tell me to within three degrees, what direction my camera was faced. More than that, it can now offer me a range of options to do with my location. For instance, it can provide me with images that look like the walls are transparent, i.e. I can see pictures other people have previously taken of the unseen parts. It means I am so much better prepared when I go through a door (for instance) wheeling a trolley full of documents, and won't snag on the photocopier just inside the door and to the left.

I also want to be able to view adverts for businesses in the building I just photographed, reviews of them (that's the social tagging part of the application) and see a gallery of pictures. Did you just spot that? "I also want to be able to view adverts for businesses in the building" the company building this gets to sell location based targeted advertising - and users are going to want it! Because they want to know about that shop they're outside of.

Why are the users going to provide the content? Well, to be informed of a place or feature they will need to take a picture of it. That picture, if it's better than others or fills in a missing detail, will become content. And because we all have opinions and like to make them known, tags and reviews will flow in too. A good piece of software will choose the most common themes out of the reviews and synthesise them into the popular voice, as well as providing anyone that wants it with all the original reviews and tags. At data prices, but there you go. Take as much or as little as you feel you need.

The utility doesn't end there though. Suppose I wanted to go to Noddy's Noodle Nirvana in my home city of Nedlington, Nebraska. No problem. I search for Noddy's in the database using my phone, and it gets preloaded into my GPS/mapping function of the phone. I can see pictures of the place and surroundings, find places to park nearby. In effect, I've found my way to Noddy's before even leaving, scouted the layout, planned my parking or bus route, and I'm now on my way.

I arrive there, and Noddy's nutty noodle chef has set the place ablaze. I'm trapped inside. But the phone knows I'm there, and the fire alarm has triggered a message to my phone showing me where the exits are. I make it outside and see the Fire Chief using his mobile device to call up a plan of the building, where the lifts and exits are, the hydrants, structural details, members of his team. Anyone with a similarly equipped phone, the Chief is fully aware of where they are at any given moment, until they leave the mission zone. Am I out in the muster area? Trapped in a stairwell? 200 yards away and out of the picture? My phone will have let the emergency teams know. Need to access surveillance cameras and see what's happening? Sure, the system knows where each camera is and if you have the clearance, you get to use them.

Is that not what a Killer App comprises of? Useful, money-making, life-saving, simple to implement? If you work for a cellphone or software developer and find this idea just grabs you, feel free to use my Paypal link and make a huge donation... %)

How Smarter Traffic Lights Could Save The World

2008-10-08T23:50:00.000-07:00

Following on from that previous post , about free electric vehicles: If you're a mayor of a large city and want to reduce the pollution, the waste of fuel, the extra thousands of litres of fuel your citizens use every week, you may well want to commission someone to help you with a few road changes...

I've long maintained that a leading cause of speed and alcohol related accidents in cities occur at intersections. You can agree with me or disagree, I just think back to how much detritus I see from accidents at intersections versus the rather smaller amount of broken glass at points along lesser roads.

Speeding to a light to catch the amber would have to rank really high on the list of intersection accidents, is what I would say, judging from the number times a day I see cars flashing across intersections just as my light is turning green.

So - given that computer power is dirt cheap these days, and software exists to examine an image for known outlines such as "car" or "motorcycle" or "truck" - why aren't there four or eight computers in that big ugly traffic light controller box at intersections, and at least two cameras pointing at oncoming traffic in each direction?

The average traffic light set is an embarassingly stupid pile of relays, and in the case of Perth, most of them worked on high voltage AC current until recently, and still had filament light bulbs. Only recently have they changed to LED bulbs, which has no doubt increased reliability, but I'd say they are still on mains AC voltage...

Back to my point: If a computer can compare the length of the traffic tails in each direction, it can adjust the green and red times of the lights to suit traffic conditions. This would reduce the amount of time that cars spend standing still at lights, idling, wasting fuel, and creating an emissions congestion, a "stink spot." Any easing in traffic flows has to save fuel and pollution, right? In periods of low traffic, it can even make it possible for vehicles to flow straight through, using its control to cycle the lights more rapidly than it would during a congested period.

But the most important benefit is a hidden one: You can see the speed of each individual vehicle by comparing subsequent frames of video. That means that, even in the case where traffic is light, you would give a red light automatically to a single speeding vehicle, or a column of vehicles the majority of which are speeding. You standardise the speed of traffic and make it easier to adjust the flows between lights, and you discourage speeding drivers who soon perceive speeding as being non-productive.

And because you have those cameras, if a speeder does run a red light, you have a nice pretty picture of them for their court case...

Free Car, Anyone?

2008-10-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

If you got a free car offered to you, wouldn't you? This article says that financial wizardry can somehow make that happen, that you can own a car for the same cost as repayments on a conventional vehicle.

I'm going to go a step further...

Imagine for a moment, that you are one of the countless suburbs dwellers who commute to work, using the bus and train services or your own car or a carpool car. Whichever way you travel will cause pollution and greenhouse gas emission. Electric trains are some way towards being much friendlier, and many cities have them. But suppose you're not in the service area for a local train?

You'd take a bus. Now I've seen diesel buses, petrol buses, natural gas buses, and hydrogen fueled buses. Except for the last, they still emit unacceptable amounts of pollution.

So - suppose that an entire city decided to "green up." What can they do? Well - how about banning anything other than approved electric vehicles in the city centre, and major business centres? Most businesses only need to transport staff around, and have a commuter workforce that generally comes from the suburbs, an average of 5 to 25 miles each way. If you could put those people into the buses and trains, you'd achieve a major reduction in pollution.

Now suppose you gave each household (excluding flats and apartments) which is within the city a free electric car. It's not transferable, is permanently assigned to the house. You can take just yourself, or yourself and your car pool friends, that's up to you. You will have to pay electricity to recharge the car, and a surcharge fee to the local council or shire, and pay for damaged or lost vehicles. But essentially you have a free transport.

Now make the city's centres a "no go" area for conventional vehicles. Also, make major commute routes a no-go zone as well, cut down on conventionally-fueled vehicles in long queues. People with their own ZEV/PZEV vehicles are permitted, people with their free electric vehicles will be permitted, and anyone who absloutely requires to use a conventional engined vehicle in those no-go zones may buy a permit by the year.

It would take only a few months to make a place green this way.

Where to get these vehicles? Well, one of the reasons electric vehicles are so hella expensive is that they are competing on the road with much heavier, much faster conventional vehicles. They have to be designed to resist a 250km/h impact even though any two EVs would only ever have a combined impact speed of about 150km/h, because conventional vehicles share the road with them. Since you're taking the majority of those off the road with the permit system, you reduce the problem to near zero. Most major roads have the capability to have an isolated "high speed" lane for permit vehicles, thus separating the traffic

Also - consider smaller electric buses. LOTS of them. Since most places already have a transit card system, you can make the electric buses a cheaper fare, afford to run tens of thousands instead of thousands. Rely on the fact that work on new ultracapacitor batteries will reduce the time taken for recharging a bus down to a minute or two, and give enough juice to make it a viable means of transport. Your old fossil-eating buses? Sell them to the people who want a mobile home. (And can afford the cost of running them...) Or turn them into emergency facilities that can be moved to where they're needed. Nothing fancy, just kitchens and small surgeries and so forth.

One last thought. Thousands of people lose their lives every week, in city traffic accidents. The leading cause of these accidents is excessive speed. If you want to reduce that death toll, this is another way to that goal.

Self-Defeating Devices 101 - classes in "what the?"

2008-10-08T22:24:00.000-07:00

Unless there are an awful LOT of devices in your home drawing so-called "vampire power" (i.e. they still draw power even when turned off, as most TVs and audio equipment still seems to do) you might not see the value in this device. I mean, it has to remain powered up in order to manage the other power points, and each power point where you plug in one of the remote receiver/switch units will be drawing vamp power itself. Seems kind of pointless to me...

Solar. Now U Doin It Right.

2008-10-08T17:47:00.000-07:00

First, a random thought about "poo humour." Why? hehehehe when someone has an article like this one, why mess with the words "poo power" when they could just come right out and say "shitricity, fo shiz!" Much better "ring" to it. (oops, no pun intended. yeah.)

UPDATE: Awwww crap! Just too many articles on this topic for me to 'void it, must be a movement...

UPDATE to the UPDATE: I've broken this out to a new post as today, the crap articles have flowed freely... I'm flushed from laughing...

Thoughts on suntricity (hehehe wish I could copyright this but someone else uses it as a business name already) as I read articles. A certain company has been making the rounds with their tubular cells but they've kind of missed the boat on one or two things they could do to improve their product, in my book.

One, it's glass tubes. At least flat panels have progressed to the point where they are warranted against 1" (2.4cm) hailstones for breakage, these tubes don't inspire me with the same confidence. Sorry...
Two, they do say it's difficult to manufacture their CIGS technology , especially in a tubular format. See my suggestions further down.
Three. Cylindrical format. Ah-uh. Sorry folks at Solyndra, there are two things I think of immediately. First, you say there's some "reflection" off the underlying rooftop but unless you space the tubes well apart, there should be no such thing. And if you do space the tubes apart to allow light through, then you're wasting surface area. Secondly, the reflected energy is much less than the direct energy so it's not going to account for a significant increase in energy production.
Four. Claimed low wind loading allows the panels to just be sat on roofs without needing tricky mountings. Sorry. I totally disagree, there are any number of wind strengths between calm and cyclone that can lift surprisingly heavy objects off your roof. I totally wouldn't just rely on "low wind loading" and friction to hold my investment of suntricity to the roof. Low wind loading also has to be achieved by leaving bigger spaces between tubes, see "Three" above.

There are several things Solyndra can do though, to make their concept more of a market winner. Here's my favourites:

If you can print cylinders with CIGS material, then you should also be able to print corrugated sheets. Instantly, you still have the same "presents more area to the sun during the day" kind of curved upper surface, but now you also have the spaces between the "half-tubes" used to collect solar radiation.
And cover the upper surface with some tough transparent coating, that will withstand a few hailstones.
Lastly, get over the fact that you'll need to mount the panels, at least to some degree. Look at it this way - corrugation lends a lot of strength to the material so complicated mountings are still not necessary, it's still cheap to put them up. And you'd only have to produce the cells in 2" to 4" wide wiggly strips, then bond 36 of them to a corrugated backing sheet and you have an 18V panel. No need for glass, either. Some form of fibreglass or other rigid plastic would do the job nicely, and still be light, to boot.

Oh - look here! Maybe you could talk to this company and use their film material to make your corrugated cells from... Or take an idea from their process, which can be much more easily applied to a corrugated sheet than a cylinder.

Oh - and if you're making such cells, then for simplicity's sake produce the backing sheets in a size and spacing that will just lay on top of building material like ordinary corrugated iron. Then, a corrugated iron roof can be easily clad with solar panels, and if you make your material conform to building code, the corrugated roofing can be made of just your solar panels, leading to a lighter roof that performs a dual function.

Oh - and one last thought. Photovoltaic cells all have one other trait - they get less efficient the hotter they get. Do yourself a favour, and make the backing sheet a structure with tubes built in, so that you can pass water through to cool the cells and provide hot water to the building the panels are attached to. Two extra benefits for the price...

As always, if you work at one of these places and like my ideas, contact me, or make a donation using my Paypal link, or both.

Methanade?

2008-10-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

You know what they say, "when the world hands you lemons, make lemonade" - well, I don't understand why there aren't companies piping this and using it to generate electricity or some other form of useful work. I mean - it's going to end up in the atmosphere and doing a lot of damage if we just let it go, it wouldn't be possible to confine or convert it, so why not use it to reduce some amount of fossil fuel use?

A small, agile power company could probably make enough money on this to make it worthwhile, and collect accolades for being green at the same time...

It's A New Meme For Life.

2008-10-07T06:14:00.000-07:00

Love the closing remarks on this article - spooky how synchronous things can be sometimes...

"Check your hair shirt at future's door. Sustainability and personal responsibility go well together."

Or this article , favourite quote: "Well, it turns out that small steps and individual actions DO make a difference."

Fossett - Where Was His EPRIB?

2008-10-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

Far more than the "mystery" surrounding Fossett's death, there's a question that bugs me - what happened to his EPIRB? I'm not sure of the aviation law regarding EPIRBs on aircraft in the States, but I believe it's a requirement under the Law here to have an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) on aircraft, and they want to make the same thing law for watercraft at some point, too.

Thing is, an EPIRB is made to be pretty much indestructible. It transmits a signal on a specific VHF frequency, can transmit continuously for days, and it's pretty hard for it not to be noticed because every aircraft checks the frequency, satellites monitor it, and groundstations have dedicated receivers on that frequency. That's the beauty of an ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter, another name for an EPIRB) onboard. It's a very very very rare occasion that they fail to operate, and when they do, it's generally not long before someone's at the scene.

I can understand how a crash can occur in rugged country, given a puff of cloud or a laspe of attention. Clouds in particular are dangerous when close to terrain. Many pilots are familiar with the joking term "cumulus granitus" meaning a cloud with a montain enshrouded inside it. It doesn't have to be a large cloud, they are surprisingly dense when you're in them, and amazingly large compared to how you perceive them from the ground.

I'll look forward to reading why the owner of the plane, one of the richest men in the world, couldn't afford to put a life saving device in an aircraft he loaned to someone else to trust their life to.

There are some things that won't change.

2008-09-27T21:09:00.000-07:00

Do you agree with this article ? Or like me, do you get an awful sense of deja vu? Like, remembering the furore and hooha about - well, lemme see - oh yeah, um gopher and ftp - no-one would care about IP rights any more, civilisation was going to end, yada yada. The World Wide Web - no-one would care about IP rights any more, civilisation was going to end, yada yada. Music and file peer networks - no-one would care about IP rights any more, civilisation was going to end, yada yada.

Now it's the turn of VR (the technology of which, by the way, has been around since VRML standards were first laid down before the Internet had really opened its doors to the public. Now all of a sudden there's the same crap, again.

"What's that thing?"
"Ugh. M-kalak made it, he calls it the World Wide Wheel. It lets you carry big stuff all by yourself, easily."
"Oh great - soon no-one care about hunting rights any more, civilisation gonna end, yada yada. Hey did I just invent 'yada yada?'"
"Ugh, yeah. 8 - ) <- (smiley face.) Oh ugh! Now I gone and invented SFSF . Ugh! And acronyms!"

No shit hey? Whenever anyone invents something, someone will use it for evil? Where did you ever get that idea from? And it's up to us as individuals to make sure we don't get evilled? What a radical idea! You mean, like, we need to look out for ourselves, no Government nannies to intervene for us? G'wan, get outta here!

:UPDATE: Seems that maybe VR insecurities are the least, and least relevant, of the problems that face IT departments and companies today. Some people just have no respect for IP rights, civilisation's gonna end, yada yada.

Inventor For Hire.

2008-09-13T02:17:00.000-07:00

I remember, back in 2004, saying to the people at the company where I worked, "This would be right up our alley! We already produce one of the best 3D GIS type applications, and the hardware to do what I'm thinking surely can't be too far away."

The lethargy and ennui was palpable, it was a bit like speaking to a bunch of fish heads at the local seafood shop. Glazed eyes, mouths slack, and definitely no sign of interest. What was I referring to? That soon, mobile devices would have GPS built-in, that we already knew how to extract significant details out of an image file, and that more and more images were going online, of places of interest.

So if you know the GPS location of a PDA, and you have a picture taken by that device at that spot, you could quite quickly and easily extract salient features, and figure out what the picture was of, and send back information on that particular feature. Add the image to your stock of images of the place if it showed any improved salient feature information.

Then - four years later, I see this. They've added the ability to add social tags and info. But in general, I can only say "f*ck you, my former employers, for being so reticent to try something new."

Wouldn't be so bad if it was a one off, but it's not. It's one of a long string (probably close to several hundred if I stopped count, much as that would annoy me) of ideas and concepts I've had, and of which a few dozen then surfaced in real life, some with quite compelling success.

So if you're a person or company not averse to possibly developing the next Killer App or Killer Device, talk to me. Tell me what you do, and I'll see if I can find you a new WorldCam.

Quantum Leap For Lasers?

2008-09-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

So it looks like the defence forces in the USA will have tactical lasers to add to their armoury in a year or less. And their own admission is that they will not really be a humane weapon at all, it seems that they've taken a step backwards here.

Honestly - does this sound humane?

"[F]rom what we know, the Air Force considers laser effects on eyes and skin, for the most part. Skin damage is very much easier to achieve than penetration; simply raising skin temperature to (say) 80C/ 180 f to a depth of a couple of millimeters will cause serious blistering (second-third degree burns). If 40% of the body is burned in this way, then the target will be disabled and may die."

Ummm that makes the tacticla laser a weapon which is surely never intended to actually be used against a human opponent? Therefore, this weapon must work by increasing the fear and terror of the enemy. And that kind of mkaes it a weapon of terrorism doesn't it? How ironic...

Here's a thought for all those people out there thinking up bigger ans nastier ways to kill other people - the laser is an effective weapon because it aligns all the waves of the light. But the photons comprising those entrained waves are still spread out over a considerable distance. Now that science has proven that they can slow down photons, think how much more "pew-pew" a laser would be if, instead of delivering all those photons in an entrained wave but temporally disparate, and instead concentrated the photons into a single event... At least it would punch a hole through the target rather than slow broil them...

Society killzones, a population control mechanism.

2008-09-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

What if the killzone is inside you? What if, eh? In high school I had a biology teacher who gleefully referred to the penicillin barrier as "the kill zone." I often wonder if he had more than an inkling, and if his not yet felt inklings coloured my life.

The "kill zone" is that ring of penicillin you paint in the agar-agar growth medium, to prevent whatever you're culturing in the centre from reaching the edges of the petri dish. The smudge of living fungus, or whatever that you put in the centre, multiplies happily until it reaches the barrier, where it's stopped. Works great for non-airborne things, and I spent most of my time peering at the throngs of bugs I grew, never having to worry about them getting loose and contaminating other experiments, other people, or myself.

But since then I've discovered that we humans have a lot of built-in kill zones and barriers. For example - try to think about a truly infinite Universe - at some stage you'll run into a place where your mind won't go further, outside of which you just can't comprehend.

For example, if I tell you the Universe is infinite and so is Time, you'll nod and say "ah yes - and it's curved, too" without really batting an eyelid. Then I'll ask you whether you believe in God or The Big Bang. "Oh yeah!" you'll say, "I tend to believe " whatever theory you follow. And then I'll lead you into the place where we can't cross...

See, if the Universe and Time really are infinite, then at some point in the Universe, at some time, there will have been or is yet to be, a moment when God creates the Universe. And wherever or whenever in the Universe that happens, it will by default become true in the entire Universe... So the theologists will rub their hands gleefully and will politely point out that this shows how entirely pruent it is, to live a good Christian life. Just because, once and wherce this happens, it will become The Law.

At which point I'll happily point out to them that by the definition of "infinite possibility" there must also be a whence and wherce, in which the Universe appeared in the blinking of a Big Bang. And that too, once or wherce it happens, must also become The Law. Ditto for Buddhism, zoroastrianism, spontaneous generationism, and "it just happened"ism. And, indeed, for EVERY conceivable scenario of Universal Creation. In fact, there MUST be a place in the Universe where it's not true that the Universe is infinite, too.

They're all true. And when it sinks in that you can't conceive that, not at all, you'll have found one of your mental killzones.

Similarly, it seems there are biological killzones in living creatures too. I've read about an experiment done with rats, which demonstrate that while there's biological pressure to reproduce and prosper, there's also a killzone which comes into effect when populations grow too large. Rats were given ideal food and water conditions, in a strictly limited amount of space.

First few generations of rats flourished and prospered in Rat Heaven. Then as the population pressure increased, their society began to break down. Mothers stopped looking after infants, stopped keeping healthy clean nests, and often went out and got pregnant immediately they'd given birth, abandoning the litter. Fights and squabbles became more callous and deadly and were fought more often, over next to no provocation. Rats sought escape in repetitive addictive behaviours.

Look - that is a piece of research I can't recall where I read it, but it impressed me even back then when I read it, because of the parallels I saw in human society. All species have a drive to "live long and prosper" but apparently we also have a killzone which says "enough is enough" and then kicks in. Honestly, look around and see the increase in the same sick-society symptoms as those rats showed. We're well on the way to rebalancing our population.

I have a theory that the increase in the speed at which we can get from place to place has something to do with a perception of a greatly increased population, and therefore the "life is cheap" symptoms creep in. Also, we probably communicate with between 10 and thousands more people than our ancestors, so once again we experience much the same population pressure as we would if those people were all living in the same place as us. And I'm guessing that whatever mechanism causes the socialisation failures in us is being tickled by this huge perceived population.

Maybe autistic people have developed the ultimate coping mechanism...

The Genie We Didn't Want.

2008-08-12T01:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a scenario. And here's my thought about it: Turning our collective backs on technology as "too dangerous" is never gonna happen. Here's another NYT article on a similar topic. Doping athletes should be legalised. Dope-free Olympics? Is never gonna happen either.

As the latter article points out, voluntarily turning our backs on a competitive edge is not going to happen. Athletes are just going ot get into an escalating race to find the undetectable dope, officials will attempt to find the infallible test, and athletes are going to keep doing it, mostly without being detected.

Similarly, any new technology like robotics with tremendous capabilities, farming advances that promise to triple yields, and weapons research, are never going to go away. Always there will be many groups clandestinely working on the technology and applying it, and trying to devise ways to find out if "them others" are breaking the agreement that we're using to our advantage - by breaking it ourselves.

In Olympic doping, the athletes are undergoing a transformation, and altering their bodies for performance. In general technology, we're altering the world in profound ways, not all of which will end happily. As I say in another article though, we're going to keep doing both, messing with our bodies and with our world.

Maybe it's part of our evolution, that we'll have to engineer our own bodies to withstand the rigors of the harsh world we're creating with technology. Maybe that's the fate of any species that dabbles in technology, maybe this is that genie that can never be put back in the bottle.

A History of the Future of Tech

2008-05-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Technology marches all over every aspect of our lives. Not in a bad way, but still...

I'm going to pose a question or two, see what you think.

In my last post I mentioned that so much has changed so fast. In fact, I'd venture to say that the last 200 years have seen more invention and advance than the rest of human history together, if you list each of our scientific/technological/biological/mathematical/whatever achievements.

This chap along with Shockley Brattain and Bardeen made the first transistors a possibility. He helped develop the first working practical transistor in his early 30's and passed away a few days ago aged 91.

Question 1: Do you reckon Morgan Sparks could have predicted how fast the world would take to his invention and miniaturise it to the point that any 1000 top end laptops made today probably contain more junctions than all the discrete transistors ever manufactured?

Question 2: What was more effective at changing the world, the unleashing of the awesome power of the atom on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the mid 40's, or the unleashing of the amount of data, information exchange, and communication speed made possible by these four men in the early 50's just a few years later?

Kind of thought-provoking, huh?

Question 3: Do you think that the effects of nanotechnology and genetics/geneticmod and other fields is being similarly underestimated today? And will arrive a whole lot faster than the current electronic technology has?

Okay - another one for you. Given the iPhone and the trend it has started among others, what's left for the mobile phone industry? Keep in mind that mobile phones have all but killed the wristwatch industry to the point where they now have trouble avoiding the red in their figures, and that mobile phones have become more and more like micro versions of tablet and UMPC style machines.

Can I suggest something?

It won't be too long now before biotechs and nanotechs and genetechs experience an epiphany event - when they realise that together, they can create something that far exceeds the humble microchip in capability and capacity. And best of all, they will realise that it can be built right inside the most complex machine we know, ourselves. At that point transistors, microchips, mobile phones, computers, laptops, UMPCs, and the whole slew of devices we are used to seeing today will become as irrelevant and scarce as wristwatches...

Tech Marches. And Marches. Where Does It Go To?

2007-11-11T15:43:00.000-08:00

As the article says, 60 years ago we only had vacuum tubes, which would make a computer such as this laptop I'm typing this on, around about the size of half the CBD of Perth. Considering that the image to the left contains vacuum tubes about as high as a lipstick and not quite twice the diameter (so you can imagine the scale) and is probably less than 1k of memory...

In just over fifty years we've gone from technology that barely managed to amplify whispers, to machines that we now take for commonplace, such as my laptop, and supercomputers in a case the size of an old PC tower.

Fifty years ago when I was a baby, my grandparents, going to the city of Vienna for the first time to visit their daughter, my mother, made the sign of the cross each time mum turned on an electric light. A few years later they were watching black & white TV, and a few years after that, colour TV.

Thirty-eight years ago I was avidly hooking together vacuum tube radios and tape decks and getting electric shocks and wishing I had some of those new fangled solid state devices, those transistors. They were well beyond the pocketmoney of a kid, but a few years later I worked with aircraft avionics and built a 4bit computer with 1024 BITS (not bytes!) of memory from a kit.

Thirty-and-some years ago, I bought a ZX-80 computer that was twenty to fifty times faster and more powerful, in a quarter of the size. Since then, progressivley better and better machines, to the point where a PDA which is one tenth to one twentieth the size of my first homebrew computer packs quite a few orders of magnitude more processing power and millions of times more memory.

Current designs will allow the processing power of a supercomputer cluster, in a device the size of a PDA or small tablet PC. And beyond that?

In Times To Come

2007-05-22T08:52:00.001-07:00

I know I haven't been blogging to this blog for a while, and I've taken the old arachnet version offline, but this will all change soon, as soon as I have time between contracts again. I promise I'll be adding the old articles to this blog soon.

For now, I want to heark back to my favourite issue, transhumanity. I am still of the opinion that the first decent robot won't be developed until after we've managed to duplicate most of the cells of the human body - and then remove the cells and leave the duplicating structure. I similarly think that once nanotechnology can do that, i.e. create a second, more durable brain and a second more durable set of nerves and muscles and skin and bone - in the spaces between the cells - then we will also have enough of a handle on these things to download a mind and personality, store it, restore it.

It's been one of my tenets - first they will figure out a fairly simple thing like replacing a strand of nerve by "growing" nanoparticles that attach to specific places along the nerve cell, in effect paralleling the nerve. Because nanoparticles work at a very fine scale, the two sets of atoms will pretty much inter-exist, and take up hardly any more space than the original nerve did.

Once you do that, you have a man-built part intimately grown into the human cells it replaces. A man-built part that, having built, you can attach an input/output (I/O) connection toif you wanted to. But nerves is small change, do this at the level of brain neurons and synapses and you have aimulacrum of the brain, intimately grown into and among it. Here, you can begin to attach I/O of a serious order. Enough to grow a wireless network connection, for example...

And then you have download/upload capability for EVERYTHING inside. It becomes just a matter of how many petabytes it will take for a complete schematic and program. And whenmy body dies, of building the artificial body first then growing biological bits back into it, then finally hitting the upload switch.

Of course you could also clone using this, in a much more efficient and speedy way than natural biological cloning. And enhance... And add new functionality, stuff thst might comein handy. Using metallic materials for nerves results in faster signalling, i.e. faster perception and faster reflexes. Different material in the eyeball retina and lens will let us see UV and IR light. Rewire some of those cilia in the inner ear and you could hear electricity.

So when an article gets all het up about robot rights, remember that this robot could very well have started life as a nan-cy-clone of a human. They will have rights alright...

First Post

2007-05-01T04:57:00.001-07:00

First Post