Posts filed under 'Technology'
Yeah, this is pretty cool…
he Rubik’s TouchCube is gearing up to join the Rubik’s 360 at the American International Toy Fair. Christened the “first completely electronic, solvable Rubik’s Cube,” this one maintains the shape of the original but replaces the colored stickers with actual lights. Users ready to engage their minds simply hit the scramble button on the cube, and then rearrange the blocks by swiping their finger. There’s no mention of when this will take store shelves by storm, but we’re pretty sure it’ll be around for the pre-Christmas rush.
But it still pales before my incredibly expensive genius idea.
February 12th, 2009 at 09:47pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
This is amazing:
At TED last week, speaker Pattie Maes came onstage wearing something very cool indeed: a contraption, dangling from her neck, made from a Web cam, a 3M pico projector and a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a Bluetooth smartphone in her pocket.
Basically, the camera recognizes images, people or gestures you make in the air with your hands…. And the pico projector can project information onto any surface in front of you….
The point is to help you process information on the go, using the whole Internet as your right-hand man; the entire world becomes a multitouch surface.
(…)
* When you want to check the time, you draw a circle on your left wrist; the projector displays a clock right on your arm.
* You hold up your boarding pass; the words DELAYED 20 MINUTES or ON TIME are beamed onto it.
* You hold up your left hand, fingers pointing to the right. The system recognizes that you want to make a call, and projects a dialing pad onto your fingers. You tap the virtual keypad with your right hand to dial the call.
* You hold your fingers out at arm’s length forming a square, the way a cliché Hollywood director does to frame a scene. The system snaps a photo of what’s enclosed by your fingers. Later, you can sort, resize and fiddle with these photos by projecting them onto any wall and dragging their images with your fingertips, à la Microsoft Surface.
(…)
You can see the videos of these demonstrations here and here, although they’re missing the narration. It’s very rough, it’s still a prototype, and it’s not clear to me how many of these demos are just simulations. But it’s a very cool idea.
I. Want. This.
February 12th, 2009 at 07:15am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
At least, I think it’s a watch…
Free, disruptive. The latest Concord specimen grants time a space that is commensurate with its personality; that of freedom from constraints or ties. With an aerial bi-axial Tourbillon mechanism, a structure that makes emptiness its core material, a skeletized dial, functional elements fitted to the side of the carriage and an industrial and minimalist spirit, the C1 QuantumGravity timepiece defies all laws, including that of logic and most of all, of gravity.
The Tourbillon cage, which is fitted outside the movement and case where it is suspended, literally, rotates in a multi-dimensional manner on two axes, the main one being vertical. The structure of this disconcerting timepiece gives the cable-stayed bridges their rigid and light connection; an extended arm of cables fastened to the plate holds the cage in a vertical position, thus highlighting the sensation of autonomy.
Beneath the impressive sapphire crystal lies a panorama at its most extensive, giving shape to time, which becomes almost immaterial. While the dial strives to display the passing of time, it above all highlights empty space. The depth of its field of vision is dizzying and the feeling of levitation exhilarating. The officer-style hinged back excels in revealing the geometric circuit of the right-angled skeletized bridges in a titanic case measuring 47.5 mm in diameter and 22 mm in depth. Its infinite preciousness holds many more temporal surprises…
The C1 QuantumGravity timepiece, designed by the “C Lab Series” team in conjunction with BNB Concept, takes watchmaking experimentation even further. It follows the impulse of a brand that defends its conviction of time inevitably linked to space. In this parallel and unconventional world, infatuation with non-conformity underscores Concord’s creative spirit. C1 QuantumGravity is the latest living proof.
Wow. This might actually be the first TimeCube-compatible timepiece in recorded history.
(h/t Engadget)
January 20th, 2009 at 09:30pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology,
Weirdness
Oh. My.
January 12th, 2009 at 06:35am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Technology,
Weirdness
So, not only did I manage to get Linux running off a USB flash drive, but I managed to port that install over to my ginormous 64GB USB flash drive, and to get around the fact that when Linux is running off of the flash drive, it refuses to mount it in any visible way (I’m sure it’d be cake for a Linux guru, but I’m not one). Basically, I figured that if it was mounted somewhere to run the OS, then it had to be there somewhere, so I ran a search for the folder I stashed all my flash drive data in, found it, and created a shortcut for it. I also was able to map my network drives, so I’m pretty much in business. Sweet.
Next step is to copy that Linux install onto a CompactFlash and/or Memory Stick Duo, so I can boot Linux from my camera or PSP. This is completely impractical for anything other than annoying my girlfriend, but I think that’s reason enough.
In the other direction, I moved some partitions around and installed the Windows 7 beta, and so far it’s pretty darn slick. I’ve installed most of my essential stuff, and I haven’t run into any bugs or compatibility issues yet. I can even connect to public wifi, which I can’t do in Vista – or Linux, for that matter. I am actually writing this post in Windows 7 right now, and look how much more awesome it is than all the posts I wrote in Vista and XP.
January 11th, 2009 at 04:55pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
So, let’s recap:
AT&T got an exclusive deal to carry the iPhone.
Sprint got an exclusive deal to carry the Palm Pre, which is probably one aggressive product cycle away from being an iPhone killer, if it isn’t already (more on that later).
Verizon got an exclusive deal to carry… the Blackberry Storm. Way to go, guys. Great “get.”
This was not a great week for Apple either. First they basically stood pat at MacWorld, now Palm announces a new phone that addresses a lot of the iPhone’s shortcomings. Currently, I have five reasons not to buy an iPhone, and Apple seems pretty determined not to address any of them:
1) No Copy & Paste. I like being able to blog from my phone in a pinch, even if it probably is something only crazy people do. Pretty hard to blog without being able to copy text. Pre has copy & paste.
2) No Removable Battery. Sometimes you just can’t get to a charger, so it’s nice to have a spare. Pre has a removable battery.
3) No Keyboard. When I get rolling, I can type in bursts of up to 45-50 words per minute on my Treo keyboard. I’d probably be lucky to manage 10 on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard. Pre has a slide-out keyboard that makes it look a bit like an ultra-long Treo Pro.
4) Crappy Video Codec Support. The iPhone doesn’t play DivX, Xvid, WMV, or Flash video other than YouTube. Neither does the Pre, although I’m hoping someone can write an application for it… and get it published in the app store.
5) Lousy Carrier. I think Sprint has a better network than AT&T, but still not as nearly as good as Verizon’s.
Some other Pre highlights:
Screen: Slightly smaller than iPhone (3.1″ vs. 3.5″), same resolution (320 X 480). Bigger and better than the Centro or any previous Treos.
Multitouch: Yes.
GPS: Yes.
On-Board Storage: 8GB, with MicroSD expansion slot, which currently means a max capacity of 24GB.
Browser: Webkit-based – apparently it’s tabbed, fast and capable. I’d like to try it on some of the sites that always give me trouble before I pass judgment on it.
Operating System: Pretty slick, but hard to explain. I’m still not entirely sure I follow it all myself, but it sounds like it’s amazingly good at multi-tasking, and making it easy to manage all the open applications.
Now, if they can just get the Pre close to the $199 price point…
UPDATE: D’oh! My bad, the Pre does not have a MicroSD slot. I saw MicroUSB and misread it. 8GB onboard is pretty damn good for a smartphone, but not so much if it wants to take on the iPhone as a multimedia device. Still, it’s only a first-generation device, so hopefully that will improve.
January 8th, 2009 at 07:31pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
I have spent a good chunk of two nights messing around with it, but I finally managed to install Ubuntu Linux (“Intrepid Ibex”) onto a USB thumbdrive that I can actually boot and run my laptop from. In fact, I’m writing my post in Linux running off my USB drive RIGHT NOW (well, not exactly right now, as this is a time-release post, but it is written in Linux). It’s not all the way there in terms of user-friendliness or hardware compatibility, but Linux has come a long, long way since I first started dabbling with it in the days before Windows XP came out, and it’s pretty close to a normal Windows/MS-Office experience now. I just have to mount my Windows partitions so I can get at all my stuff, and then I should be golden.
Also: I totally want a 2-terabyte(!) SD card now. God only knows when we’ll actually see SD cards that big, but I love the idea of being able to store all my data on one tiny little card. And if I could put a 2TB card in my camera, I would probably never have to delete a photo off of it for as long as I live. And just think about iPods and iPhones with capacities measured in TB instead of GB. Awesome.
January 8th, 2009 at 11:18am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
Or maybe it’s like when criminals make sure the new guy does at least some of the dirty work, so he can’t rat them out later…
Ruegsegger was one of 100 people at a Bond Hill meeting Tuesday about the digital TV conversion with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin.
Most of the questions were about flaws in a program – now out of money – by another federal agency to provide two free $40 coupons for converters enabling old analog sets to receive digital signals.
The government has ordered full-power TV stations to switch to digital signals on Feb. 17, which Martin called “the biggest change in TV history since color television.”
More than a dozen people complained to Martin that their coupons had expired in 90 days, before they could purchase converters, a clock-radio-size device.
Because the government will not reissue coupons to the same address, Martin recommended that those needing coupons ask a friend, neighbor or relative with cable or satellite service, or new digital TVs – who don’t need the converters – to apply for them.
“Find someone else to apply and get them for you. They are fully transferable. What’s important is that you get a coupon and go get a converter box,” Martin said.
Ruegsegger tried to do just that with a neighbor – but they halted the online process when the neighbor was required to lie about needing coupons for his own home.
“That’s not right, to make you falsify an application,” Ruegsegger told Martin, while several applauded at the Cincinnati-Hamilton County Community Action Agency conference room.
Martin agreed, but said that’s what the coupon agency – the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration – “is telling people to do. They’re saying it’s OK. I’m here to tell you it’s OK,” he said.
Not only are the Bushies operating under a completely different moral code than most people, it doesn’t even occur to them that everyone else doesn’t think the exact same way. They’re cool with lying, so they figure we are, too – especially if they’ve told us it’s okay.
Also: Why not just have the coupons expire on, say, February 17th?
January 7th, 2009 at 07:45pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Bush,
Corruption/Cronyism,
Media,
Republicans,
Technology,
TV
For the love of God, it has THREE USB PORTS. Whyyy.
The latest piece of tech in the war on grandmas has gotta be Brother’s Quattro 6000D sewing machine, a beastly machine with specs that will help even the most diligent granny patch up those quilts or ripped teddies more efficiently. Once you get past the huge 50-inch workspace, you’ll notice the 4.5 x 7-inch Sharp HD LCD display and embedded runway lighting. Brother’s “InnovEye” and “Up-Close Viewer” technology places a camera right next to the needle to give the user a birds-eye view on the LCD to allow perfect placement before stitching. Advanced embroidery features and built-in tutorials should certainly mitigate any mishaps, and should you get the urge to plug every flash drive you own into it, there are 3 USB ports.
Surely this is madness.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:50pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Technology,
Weirdness
The rivalry between India and Pakistan heats up even more:
A nine year-old girl in India named M. Lavinashree has passed the Microsoft Certified Professional Exam, becoming the youngest person to ever pull it off (smashing the record previously held by a 10 year-old Pakistani girl). The youngster has a long history of making records in her short life — including reciting all 1,300 couplets of a 2,000 year-old Tamil epic at the age of three — and now she’s now cramming for the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Exam.
Way cool, and perhaps a little scary…
December 24th, 2008 at 08:01am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
Ohhh dear:
First there were dancing robots, then house-sitting robots and now a new breed of acting robots is making its big debut on the Japanese stage.
The play, which had its premiere at Osaka University, is one of Japan’s first robot-human theatre productions.
The machines were specially programmed to speak lines with human actors and move around the stage with them.
Playwright Oriza Hirata says the work raises questions about the relationship between humanity and technology.
The play, called Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker), is set in the near future.
It focuses on a young couple who own two housekeeping robots, one of which loses its motivation to work.
In the play, the robot complains that it has been forced into boring and demeaning jobs and enters into a discussion with the humans about its role in their lives.
So far, the play is only 20 minutes long but it is hoped to become a full-length production by 2010.
This can only end badly.
(h/t Engadget)
November 27th, 2008 at 05:30pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Art/Architecture,
Technology,
Weirdness
Not that I would ever try to do this…
A one-eyed San Francisco artist wants to replace her missing eye with a Web cam – and tech experts say it’s possible.
“I’d always given thought to using cameras to restore sight to the blind,” said Dr. William Danz, whose patient, Tanya Vlach, wants the groundbreaking device. “This is a little different, more like James Bond stuff.”
Vlach, who lost her eye in a 2005 car accident, wears a realistic acrylic prosthesis, but she’s issued a challenge to engineers on her blog: build an “eye cam” for her prosthesis that can dilate with changes of light and allow her to blink to control its zoom, focus, and on/off switch.
“There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek,” said Vlach, 35. “With the advancement of technology, I thought, ‘Why not?’”
The eye cam could allow her to record her entire life or even shoot a reality TV show from her eye’s perspective. Vlach said she will let inspiration strike once she has the device.
“There are a lot of ideas floating around…nothing too exploitative,” said Vlach. “I don’t want to be a spy and infringe on people’s rights, and at the same time, there are amazing possibilities.”
(…)
“It is possible to build a wireless camera with the dimensions of the eyeball,” said [Roy] Want, a senior principal engineer at Intel. “You can find spy cams or nanny cams designed to fit into inconspicuous places in the home.”
Want said the camera, which would be encased in Vlach’s prosthesis to avoid moisture, could link wirelessly to a smart phone.
The smart phone could send power to the camera wirelessly and relay the camera’s video feed by cell phone network to another person, a TV studio or a computer.
In a world where eye cams are common, they might serve as a kind of computerized backup to people’s memories, Want said.
“You’d never need to forget anything again,” he said. “You’d never lose anything. You could ask it, ‘Where was the last time I saw my keys?’”
Pretty cool, but my standards are a little more… exacting:
I would like to add the following to my happy fantasy dream world: A professional-quality 20-megapixel thought-controlled eye camera, with a zoom lens that can instantly go from ultra-wide fisheye to ultrasupermegazoom (so much for wearing glasses). Also, it would have to be wireless so I wouldn’t have to stick USB cables up my nose.
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.
November 16th, 2008 at 02:52pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Technology,
Weirdness
This is just creepy and wrong:
According to VW’s PR team, the BabyMaker3000 has brought 314,384 digital babies into the world since going live a month ago — surpassing the number of real babies born in the U.S. during a comparable timeframe (295,075). An estimated half million visitors have checked out the site, a pretty mind-boggling number that probably says something about our desire for this type of technology in the real world.
The animated sample baby at the BabyMaker3000 site is creeping me right out. No, I have not tried it.
November 10th, 2008 at 07:24am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Technology,
Weirdness
Instructibles shows you how to make a clock out of old hard drive parts.
What are you waiting for?
(h/t Unplggd, by way of Engadget)
November 9th, 2008 at 01:28pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology,
Weirdness
I recently predicted in an e-mail that when I buy my next cellphone in early 2010, that it will be far superior to anything on the market today… and I certainly won’t even be getting the best cellphone available.
Cellphone manufacturer Ericsson has gone me one further and predicted that my next cellphone after that will have the power and screen resolution of a 1998 PC, the megapixels of a digital camera, the video resolution of a 1080 HD video camera, and a faster connection than FiOS. (Although I notice they don’t say anything about storage capacity – I’ll place my bet on 128GB or more.)
Bring. It. On.
(h/t Engadget)
November 7th, 2008 at 05:44pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
I, for one, welcome our 700-ton robot overlords…
The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.
That’s nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.
(…)
The Caterpillar trucks will be equipped with numerous high-tech gadgets and software to keep them on the road. GPS receivers would continuously monitor the location and direction of the trucks.
Laser range finders would sweep the road in front of the trucks to identify large objects. Video equipment would then determine if the object is a hazard, such as a rock, or not. All of the information would then be run through a computer program that would tell the robotic driver to avoid the obstacle or not and by how much.
(…)
The software to run the trucks will be adapted from CMU’s part in the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge, a competition that required unmanned vehicles equipped with sensors and artificial intelligence systems to navigate through an urban environment filled with obstacles. The software will require some changes to adapt to mines, Stentz said, but he wouldn’t elaborate on the details.
Fully automated mining trucks promise to reduce maintenance costs while increasing productivity. While being careful not to say what Caterpillar’s performance expectations will be, Stentz offered a “very rough calculation” that by running at peak capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the trucks could be up to 100 percent more productive.
This really is very cool, just so long as we don’t have a Maximum Overdrive situation.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:11pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
Check out this short movie here:
Now check out the camera it was shot with.
I would totally be eating my heart out for choosing Nikon if I had any interest in video at all.
This 5D video here has even better quality, but I’m not sure it’ll play for everyone.
November 6th, 2008 at 09:57pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
This is actually quite clever, and it could potentially fill the gaping void left behind since Polaroid exited the instant film business:
Polaroids may be dead, but the basic concept lives on — remember Zink, that company whose technology prints digital photos on the spot without ink? It’s joined forces with toy-maker Tomy to make the xiao TIP-521, a digital camera with a printer built in. The xiao has a modest five megapixel resolution, so we might wait and see how Polaroid’s own Zink camera turns out, but in either case we’re stoked the tactile experience is back.
I’ll probably never get one, since I don’t really care about having a physical print, but this is still a great idea. For instance, my mother’s side of the family has a quasi-reunion every year, with lots of picture-taking, but by the time the photos (whether digital or film) are processed, everyone has scattered to the four winds. If we all had Xiaos, everyone could take prints back home with them.
November 6th, 2008 at 07:57pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
Well, I guess I know whose election coverage I’ll be watching tonight…
As the news networks spend oodles of cash in order to one-up the other with whiz-bang visuals and mind-melting charts, CNN is looking to blow just about everyone else away. As election night officially kicks off in just a few hours, the network’s Wolf Blitzer will be conducting interviews with faraway strategists not via the traditional two-pane window, but by hologram. Believe it or not, professionals in Chicago and Phoenix will be beamed live to CNN’s New York studios in order to give viewers a look at Wolf and a ghostly counterpart.
This will be either ridiculously cool or a hilarious fiasco. Either way, it’s totally worth putting up with Wolf – for at least a few minutes, anyway.
November 4th, 2008 at 05:45pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Elections,
Media,
Technology
For those of you who do not travel in technogeeky circles, a case mod is essentially a PC in a custom wrapper. Instead of the standard PC case, it’s either inside a heavily modified case, or inside something that doesn’t typically hold a PC at all, like a stuffed beaver, or the USS Enterprise, just to name a couple of my favorites.
But none of those can compare to… this!
At long last, wearable computing has become a reality! And without sacrificing performance or style!
It’s both horrible and awesome at the same time…
(h/t mix_hyenataur by way of Engadget, which has some great captions)
October 29th, 2008 at 07:11am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology,
Weirdness
This is so true…
(Comic by xkcd)
October 17th, 2008 at 11:11am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Blogosphere,
Comics,
Technology
To the integrated circuit, which turned 50 years old yesterday. I am actually using this marvelous invention RIGHT NOW!
If it wasn’t for the invention of the integrated circuit, then computers today would probably be housed in huge mahogany cabinets with a baffling array of polished, brass valves, or at least be stuffed into huge boxes containing hand-soldered transistors. We owe a lot of thanks to the integrated circuit, or microchip, which is today celebrating its 50th birthday.
The first microchip (pictured) was first demonstrated by Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments on 12 September 1958. It might not be much to look at, but then Texas Instruments admits that Kilby often remarked that if he’d known he’d be showing the first working integrated circuit for the next 40-plus years, he would’ve ‘prettied it up a little.’ The chip worked, though, producing a sine wave on an oscilloscope screen at the demo.
The integrated circuit itself is the germanium strip that you can see in the middle of the glass slide, and it measured 7/16in by 1/16in. With protruding wires, and just containing a single transistor, some resistors and a capacitor, it’s a primitive chip by today’s standards. However, it opened the gate for mass production of larger-scale chips that could contain more and more transistors without the need for complicated hand-soldering jobs.
Hooray for microchips!
(h/t MAKE, by way of Engadget)
September 13th, 2008 at 10:59am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Technology
Yes, I have returned from my trip, but I’m still getting caught up on everything, so I might still be a bit sporadic until Monday.
Did you know that if you remove a SD card from your laptop’s SD slot without “stopping” it first, that Windows Vista may assign the SD card’s size to every file in the folder you have open? Imagine my surprise when I went to backup my first memory card’s worth of photos to my external hard drive and found that there was insufficient space because the folder was 414GB? (Bear in mind that my laptop has an 80GB hard drive.)
Fortunately, I was able to recover the deleted files from the camera memory card, because I was having no luck at all with fixing the 4GB image files…
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:24am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Technology,
Weirdness
(From xkcd)
August 17th, 2008 at 04:37pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Comics,
Elections,
Technology
It’s a Terminator head DVD player. I… have no words.
(From Toxel.com, by way of Engadget)
August 15th, 2008 at 07:52pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Coolness,
Movies,
Technology
Longish story in today’s NYT Science News about the need to examine our Bold Technological Solutions to make sure that they don’t create even greater problems, especially as our technology becomes more and more powerful.
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.
Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.
“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.
Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.
(…)
[R]esearchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies — and to let policy makers know of its potential.
Okay, let me just interject here: People are going to be overly complacent about climate change – or at least their own personal responsibility for it – no matter what the scientists and engineers do, so I would strongly recommend focusing solely on whether the technical fixes will work and if they will have unintended consequences. We can’t afford not to.
[S]ome emerging technologies will require political adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability.
As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.”
(…)
Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”
I am a huge technology fan, and fascinated by science fiction and The Future, so my default attitude is usually “Do it! Go go go!”, but the more far-reaching our technology becomes, the easier it is to upset the Earth’s delicate balance. Ecosystems are particularly susceptible, where slight changes can cause one species to die off, dwindle, or migrate away, allowing harmful species to take over, or killing off other dependent species, like the coral that need algae to survive.
It’s a sticky wicket, because if we haven’t already passed the point of no return on atmospheric carbon, we are very very close, and I just don’t see any political will for the radical changes needed to pull us back from the brink. A bold technological solution may be our only hope – but how can we be sure that the cure isn’t worse than the disease?
August 12th, 2008 at 07:50am
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Environment,
Science,
Technology
Now that flash memory is dirty cheap, why is it that digital cameras still have roughly the same dinky amount of onboard memory that they did when they first came out?
I can get a ridiculously tiny 1GB sliver of MicroSD memory for less than five bucks, so why can’t the camera makers just stick some in there in place of the useless 32MB cards that are in there now? Probably 90 to 99% of digital camera users would never need to buy a card for their cameras if they had a gig of built-in memory.
Or is that actually the reason? Do the camera companies have some kind of secret arrangement with the flash memory companies?
August 11th, 2008 at 09:08pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Technology
Episode #513 of Republicans Vs. Technology:
The Iranians are still exporting the most lethal explosive devices across the Iraqi border and into Iraq and killing brave, young Americans and Iran is still supporting terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. So, if they want to communicate with us and we want to communicate with them, fine. We all have blackberries. It’s fine.
Awesome. John McCain is totally “with it”, as the kids say these days.
Also worth noting from the video: A banana is not a poll.
July 29th, 2008 at 09:20pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Elections,
Iran,
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My advisor and one of my favorite profs at Stanford, Joe Corn, got interviewed by Matt Novak, the Paleo-Future blogger, about his book, Yesterday’s Tomorrows (which I have just ordered) and the concept of “future shock”:
Matt Novak: Have you ever read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock?
Joseph Corn: I did. I so vividly remember reading it in a campground in the Redwoods in Northern California.
MN: What did you think of it then and what do you think of his ideas now?
JC: [long pause] They deserve re-examination now, the concept of future shock. At the time of his writing . . . I didn’t really find it that persuasive. People talk as if future shock is a major syndrome that deserves Medicare treatment today, and I sort of feel that way. The pace at which software changes and technology generally, although it is still filling in . . . Filling in the cracks is not the right metaphor . . . I’ve had a personal computer now for 25 years and it is so different. The web, plus wireless, plus speed, plus miniaturization in the laptop form makes it something different. As we carry these things around with us when we couldn’t with an IBM PC.
MN: Do you think that all this technological change that you’ve seen recently, is that harming us? Because that seems to be the main thesis of his . . .
JC: I don’t buy that. As a historian I’m very skeptical. I think we’re trained professionally to be skeptical of . . . you might put it, in terms of the Golden Age fallacy. There was a moment when things were better and everything’s been done since. I just can’t buy that. One could worry and yet, I don’t. I just see it as different. As fascinatingly different. I just don’t see civilization going to hell in a handbasket. [long pause] At least I don’t want to.
Joe Corn was (and presumably still is) indefatigably interested and enthusiastic about everything, particularly the co-evolution of technology and culture. I read one of his earlier books, The Winged Gospel, for one of his courses, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a fascinating study of the early days of aviation, when there were all kinds of extravagant claims about how flight would fundamentally change human nature. And I don’t mean the impact of being able to travel virtually anywhere, but stuff about how being physically closer to Heaven and the angels would make us more angel-like, or that we would end up living in the air and not require any other sustenance.
Fun stuff. A year or two after I graduated, I caught up with him on a visit to campus, and he was all excited about this new course he was teaching, on the history of technical manuals. I know, that sounds like it would be the most boring class ever, but he started talking about how they made the propagation and popularization of technology possible, and it started sounding pretty good to me. Had I still been a student, I’m sure I would have signed up for it and had a blast.
Thanks, Joe. Teachers like you were what made learning worthwhile.
July 27th, 2008 at 05:58pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Blogosphere,
Books,
Coolness,
Education,
Technology
Hooray for my representative!
Internet access may not be as important as water. But it’s now right up there with hot water.
Yet given how important broadband is to the future of our economy, our educational system, even our democracy, there is amazingly little public discussion about it.
For too long, that conversation has been happening behind closed doors among self-appointed experts, deep-pocketed lobbyists and politicians who either believe the Internet is “a series of tubes” or don’t use it at all.
A notable exception is U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who’s helping to bring the entire Federal Communications Commission to a public hearing tomorrow at Carnegie Mellon University.
He voted the right way on FISA, too.
For those of you who want to attend:
The FCC hearing on the future of the Internet will start Monday, July 21 at 4 p.m. in McConomy Auditorium at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information: www.savetheinternet.com
July 20th, 2008 at 04:56pm
Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under:
Constitution,
Coolness,
Democrats,
Pittsburgh/PA,
Politics,
Technology
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