Fossett - Where Was His EPRIB?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

EDIT: Edited 27/03/2022because I realise the formatting totally sucked balls. But I have not changed a single word, nor added or subtracted any. 

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...