Where Are The Edges Of Today's Technology World? 509
Veeru writes "As
mentioned on Nova,
my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives
Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight
almost 100 years ago. Scientific
American had rejected
his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'. The secretive Wright Brothers
allowed Amos to publish
the article in his own Gleanings Bee magazine instead. Because of his objective account, other
experimenters may not have received the credit
they deserved. I recently realized
that Amos was intent on investigating
the highest tech advances of the day and that the airplane was the most
advanced phenomenon he could find. If
Amos were alive today, what obscure technology would he be
pursuing?"
The edge? (Score:5, Interesting)
Those points aside, I have been amazed by the research in nanotechnology and find the realm of mapping the human genome to be interesting as well. Perhaps subjects such as these would interest Amos? Perhaps these are not as obscure as other fields but these are certainly interesting studies.
Re:The edge? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The edge? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too many people kept waiting for AI to produce "thinking computers" and they are still waiting.
Too many people think nano-technology to work wonders and they are still trying to make simple gears do something useful.
Too many people think that Microsoft invented computing and don't realize that most of what we have today is simply re-hashing of things from the 60's, but in smaller cases.
Too many people think that Howard Dean invented the Internet (3 years ago they thought it was Al Gore) and don't realize that most of his policies were borrowed from Pat Buchanan.
We basically suffer from short term memory, short attention span and hero-worship that expects someone to come along and magically fix things without disruption to our lives. Fortunately there are some real thinkers who are not constrained by these stumbling blocks and are off doing real work. I expect them to come up with things that we haven't even considered, and then Microsoft or Howard Dean, or the like will take credit for it (and get away with it for the most part).
Am I a cynic? Yeah, but only based on past experience.
Re:The edge? (Score:3, Insightful)
1: It's "empirical". (bonus karma if you can catch the grammatical mistakes I'm bound to be making here--and no, that period-outside-of-a-quote is kosher.)
2: Atheists are no more able to not take things on faith than the rest of us; were that true, they wouldn't believe in some major historical figures.
Atheists, by and by, simply do not engage in religious discussions on the same level that "the
Re:The edge? (Score:3, Funny)
The word "bonus" started a new sentence and should have been capitalized.
Amos's interests in the 21st centure (Score:5, Funny)
specifically, in the next generation of Viagra, Rogaine, and the technology to keep human heads alive in jars as foretold by Futurama.
Time travel (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Time travel (Score:2)
Re:Time travel (Score:2, Funny)
No, the Slashdot effect is akin to quantum mechanics in that as soon as you try to look at something, it disappears.
No lasers required...
Re:Time travel (Score:2)
For christ sake "Don't Cross the Streams!"
Re:Time travel (Score:4, Insightful)
<OT rant>
The whole idea of taking traveling to the past seriously is pretty annoying. Quite simply, time travel into the past is not possible without abandoning the idea of causality. We (individual human beings) are a product of a society and environment which is also a product of human beings. What we do impacts the world, and the world impacts us. Therefore, any human being sent back in time would be a product of an unaltered environment. He/she would alter the environment in some way (by their physical presence if nothing else, even if there were no human interaction) and impact the world around them. However, the exact world which created the time traveling human no longer exists, so that exact person can no longer exist, either. Paradox, violation of causality. Not allowed.
To forstall any comments like "I'm not impacted by an air current somewhere in Brazil's forests" consider a scenario like this: the very slight change in air currents eventually leads to a change in a weather pattern in the future, which causes a thunderstorm to develop, which produces a tornado, which runs over your house and uses you for a dartboard. Yes it is fanciful, probability may be 0.000000000000000000001% or less, but it is NOT impossible. And since it is not impossible, and since we assume causality is an absolute, any path which allows the possibility of violation of causality is forbidden. Ergo, no time travel which involves any kind of interaction with the past. Period.
Of course, this rules out a lot of situations that human beings find entertaining, but suspension of disbelief in movies doesn't ususally cause me problems. If trying to do real research in time travel however, you're gonna have to get around causality. If we throw out causality, the foundations of our understanding of our existance crumble, so the arguements had better be darn good.
</OT rant>
Re:Time travel (Score:4, Insightful)
About causality, it's generally thought that no, you can't change your own past. The whole point of H.G. Well's book was that he couldn't change the past, because it was the past that caused him to create the time machine. Now if we throw into the equation the possiblity of a multiverse, then we have a whole new way of looking at the problem. Sure, time travel is possible, but it wouldn't be time travel per-se, it would be multiverse travel. Since the multiverse that you travelled to, never intersects the multiverse you came from, then you wouldn't have any fear of screwing up past events, because anything that you did would only affect the future of that multiverse, and not the multiverse that you originated from. The problem with that is, in order for you to be able to return to your proper time, you would have to locate exactly which multiverse that you came from, and follow the progress of that multiverse foward the amount of time you had been gone.. with billions of possiblities, then you're pretty well screwed because in those billions of possiblities, you will have only actually returned in one.
Okay, now my head hurts...
Re:Time travel [still OT] (Score:3, Interesting)
This is simply not correct. Time travel does not contradict causality, only some people's concept of "free will".
To explain: You cannot "change" history, simply because it "is already there". The notion of going back and "overwriting" one history with another a la Back To The Future suffers from the "Second Time Around Fallacy". H
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Time travel (Score:2, Funny)
I'M ONTO YOU, BARKER!
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Funny)
They're all back in 1986.
Re:Time travel (Score:2, Insightful)
What if they send back a swastika? (Score:2)
What if they just sent back a swastika?
Or a bunch of random made up stuff just to screw with the people in the past?
Re:What if they send back a swastika? (Score:3, Funny)
"Buy all the SCOX stock you can"
"Bush is a noble leader, vote for him"
"Liver and kidneys every day increase lifespan 300%"
That's the sort of stuff I'd be sending
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Informative)
In general I agree that time travel backward through time is impossible using the same logic you used. Maybe (though I doubt it) it is possible to use a machine to travel back to when the machine was started. As such a machine does not currently exist, we couldn't use everyday experience to rule it out.
Theories are ment to be broken (Score:2, Insightful)
As mentioned in earlier
Re:Time travel (Score:2)
If they are too far in the future, there is no reason to go 'too' far back since that wouldn't directly - at least not predictably - aff
Re:Time travel (Score:2)
Re:Time travel (Score:2)
Another potential reason for no tourists from the future could be that for someone to come back to our time would contaminate all human life here. They could be so inoculated that the germs they do have would kill us all. Like when the Europeans came to North America and so many Indians died as a result of their germs/diseases.
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Insightful)
So rather they ended up in space exactly where the earth was when they pressed "go" on their time machine.
It's complications like that that make me wonder if time travel hasn't already been invented, it's just the poor guy sent himself into a deadly vacuum.
Re:Time travel (Score:4, Insightful)
The center of our galaxy?
The center of all the visible galaxies? Oh wait, that's our galaxy itself.
The center of the universe? Which center of the universe?
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were on the time machine engineering team, and you were tasked with this part of the problem, I would say your search to find a fixed reference point to make absolute measurements off of is overly hard and possibly not even useful.
How would you _know_ motion for objects sent through time is going to match relative motion from the center of the universe (or anything else)?
Perhaps a better/much easier strategy is to stick with relative measurements; send something back in time 1/1000th of a second. Record relative movement from the starting point. Send something back 1/100th, 1/10th, etc. etc., recording movement.
Continue so you get a nice large sample set, plot the data, generate a model describing the interaction between time jump vs. distance jump. Test the model to see that it behaves as expected, if not, experiment more until it is felt your model is adequately debugged.
You will then have a useful way of predicting what will happen, without ever having needed to base things on any absolute measurement. Seeking the center of the universe for a fixed reference is now a moot point.
You don't need to have absolute measurements to do useful things. +5vdc being used in various places within your computer as your read this? Knowing that relative value is all that is necessary; the fact that the absolute (if there were such a thing) voltage of that same circuit is actually +30,005vdc doesn't keep us from getting the job done.
Never heard of Google? (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand, the Centre of the Known Universe is here [therockalltimes.co.uk], in some podunk called Rockall (motto: "There's fuck all in Rockall").
Cherokee Indians claim that the Center of the World (and therefore the known universe) is about ten miles north-northwest of Elberton, Georgia, near a bizarre roadside attraction called the Georgia Guidestones.
According to my deranged ex-fiancee, however, the center of the known universe is wherever the hell she happens to be at the moment. In other words, the center of the known universe is underneath whatever guy she met not twenty minutes ago.
So opinions vary, as do spellings. Personally, I'm going to agree with the aboriginal Americans, because I can get there in about two hours. See, there's nothing like being near the CotKU without actually having to be there. It's kinda like being in the suburbs.
Re:Time travel (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Time travel (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Time travel (Score:3, Interesting)
Obscure technologies (Score:2, Funny)
Moderation (Score:4, Funny)
Score:-1 Buffing my own pole.
Re:Moderation (Score:2)
Re:Moderation (Score:2)
Is obscurity still possible? (Score:5, Insightful)
Promises... (Score:5, Interesting)
None of this has happened.
This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of current nanotechnology and genetic solutions actually being major breakthroughs. It'll be like Moore's Law for technology - things will just progress, rather than achieve sudden overnight success. I mean flying - it's boolean - you fly or you don't fly. Once you've conquered that you can improve on it. Nanotechnology I feel really needs advances in AI and other technology fields which I feel are being neglected - batteries, vision systems, sensors - they all need to improve before nanotechnology takes off big time.
So maybe it's a disparity thing. Maybe we'll be held back in certain areas because other technologies aren't available yet - like Civilization
Re:Promises... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that hints that the X prize winner might be where we ought to be looking - theres something that has a nice boolena value: You get into space cheaply in a resusable vehicle, or you don't... and there's plenty of room for improvement once someone wins the X prize challenge: Higher (LEO would be nice), and with more payload.
Cheap and easy spaceflight could well be the teach that really reshapes the next century.
Jedidiah.
Nuts. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
Nuts. If we were to exploit the resources space offers us without going into any other major gravity wells (i.e., sticking to free space, asteroids, small moons, etc), there is (just off the top of my head):
-- MarkusQ
Re:Nuts. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it
Re:Nuts. (Score:3, Insightful)
Presently, yes, it would be rather expensive. Most of that cost though, is getting up into space from earth. There are some promising looking developments on making that immensely less expensive (the X prize). Were that to pan out then all of
Re:Nuts. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
I used coal as a shorthand for "chunks of mostly carbon that aren't diamonds or graphite"--which is close enough to the generally accepted meaning that I'm willing to stand by the useage. At any rate, there are such lumps and if you brought some back here most people would agree to call them coal.
But you'd be nuts to bring them back, and even more nuts to burn them; their primary value would be in space for use in making stuff--mostly plastics, medicines, etc., but someday diamondoid materials, buckytubes, etc.
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it to go there and bring them back. It's just too expensive. Or so I was told.:)
So don't take it back to your old grade school. Gold isn't just pretty, it's useful. It's wonderfully conductive, corrosion resistant, ductile, etc.
Stop thinking like a colonialist, and start thinking like a colonist.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Nuts. (Score:3, Insightful)
That this wealth ("enough energy for everyone alive to live better than the average American") is distributed in some other manner than 99.95% to a few hundred backscratching CEOs, with the rest of the population living below today's poverty line?
Call me socialist if you like, but it's still on my wish list for the scenario.
Re:Promises... (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot the "IMHO" part...
You may think that space flight is a huge waste of dollars. Many others do not. So long as it's not your money being spent, why should you care? "Ah" you say, "but it *is* my money, 'cos NASA is taxpayer funded." But that's the beauty of the X-prize competition that the grandparent post was referring to - it's purely privately funded. So it really doens't matter what you think about space flight. They're going to do it anyway. Who knows, maybe you'll even derive some benefit from it at some point.
We have basic space filight now. Its fairly safe and the costs are resonable.
Uh, in a word, bullshit. Especially on the "costs are reasonable" part. It costs on the order of $500 Million for a single shuttle launch, and they only happen a few times a year (and require a standing army of several thousand to support them). The whole point of the X-prize is to develop cheap, reliable, regular space launch. Everyone in the space industry (and I speak here as someone in the space industry) views launch costs as one of the greatest impediments to doing more in space. That applies to unmanned as well as manned missions.
There is simple no return on investment in continued research.
I won't even bother to debate the stupidity of that comment. The fact that people are investing would tend to imply that there is at least some perception of an ROI. Although it may depend on what exactly you consider an adequate ROI, and what time scales you are operating on.
We have a space station or will very soon, we have the shuttle which works well enough.
See above for the shuttle. It costs a crapload. Far more than it needs to. Mostly as a result of a piss-poor design that was more political compromise than anything else. The station is a nice idea but appears to be a bit of a white elephant. Right now it can only deal with a crew of up to 3, which is not a sufficient number to allow any science to take place (too busy just maintaining the station). And my understanding from talking to folks in the science community is that the station is essentially useless for it purported primary purpose, microgravity research, because astronaut induced vibrations screw up the "microgravity" environment in all but a very small part of the station.
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
It's a cost/benefit thing - there's lots of stuff in space that's be nice to make use of, but it costs too much to get it right now. Why? Well, launch costs have a lot to do with that (see above). Highly recommend that you check out a report called "LEO on the Cheap" by Lt. Col. Jack London that discusses that cascading effects of high launch costs, and how to fix them (should be available in PDF form on line - google is your friend).
I read in some physics journal once that even if you could travel faster then the speed of light you probably need around 1 1/3 times the sqare of the mass you will be moving in fule.
Depends a lot on the efficiency of your engine. Alternatively, you could make use of something like a laser sail to accelerate - then you don't need to carry any fuel. A third alternative is not to accelerate to the speed of light, but to bypass it, i.e. use one of the various (somewhat flaky at this point) "warp drives" that have been proposed. All are at least as plausible (or more plausible) than a time travel machine. Incidentally, did it occur to you that time travel is equivalent to faster than light travel in the Einsteinian universe?
Re: Space flight (Score:3, Interesting)
Your po
Re:Promises... (Score:4, Funny)
Help, I'm dying of polio!
It's not the flying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Flying's the easy part. It's the soft landing that's the bitch to get right...
Re:It's not the flying... (Score:3, Interesting)
Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. So they say.
Re:Promises... (Score:2)
I'd argue there's at least one shade of grey - gliding.
Re:Promises... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Promises... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Promises... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, can we stop calling it "nanotechnology" and start calling it what it really is?
CHEMISTRY!
I'm not trying to be funny. That new stain-defender stuff in pants? Apparently it's called nanotechnology. No! Chemistry! It's just chemistry! Stop subjecting your minds to buzzwords.
Nanotech (Score:4, Interesting)
Brief history:
-- MarkusQ
Re:Promises... (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea he fails to grasp is that flight is not really an all-or-nothing technology, at least not in terms of its impact and importance. Would it have been particularly useful if planes remained what they were at their conception? The original flying machine built by the Wrights was celebrated when it flew a distance most of us would walk. For this tech to be really meaningul took many, many years of work and continous research, both directly applied to aviation and general research with no specific applications, such as materials science, mechanical engineering, etc. It is only through a great deal of progress that flight has become as important a technology as it is today.
Similarly, the technologies the parent poster mentions require extensive work and research to bear fruit. While there are robots that can clean a whole house, they are proof-of-concepts that cost more than my car. Similar to flight, advances need to be made before it has practical applications.
I find it somewhat humorous that he states "I'm skeptical of current nanotechnology and genetic solutions actually being major breakthroughs" when if you talk to anyone receiving current chemotherapy their lives may have been saved by these breakthroughs for which he has so much skepticism. While I encourage a healthly degree of distrust, this needs to be well directed. The fact is that new technologies and new research needs to continue in every field, and if new knowledge is being obtaining by good scientific methods, and someone is willing to spend their time obtaining it, it is hard to say that that is worthless or should be stymied.
Nanotech needs AI? WTF?
I wish all technology followed moore's law ; )
The fringes of the neo-techno age (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The fringes of the neo-techno age (Score:2)
The joy of tech is that you never realise you need something until it's put in front of you. I get this sensation everytime I go shopping.
An actual case in point for me would be WiFi. Couldn't care less until someone threw me a card, and now I couldn't live without it.
YLFIRe:The fringes of the neo-techno age (Score:5, Insightful)
So true. (Score:3, Interesting)
Or even earlier: "We have very effective lances and javelins for hunt, and our shamans know which plants are edible and how to repel bad spirits. We have pretty much everything we need."
Happiness is relative. And to think we are more developped
The real edge lies elsewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
The technologies of the last 200 years have so far outstripped past human progress that the real action in the coming years/decades/centuries will be the philosophical, moral and political assimilation of technology. We've done an increasintly poor job of it as the pace of advancement has quickened; it'll be interesting to see what (if anything) causes a tipping point after which we'll really explore the full impacts of new technologies.
(Disclaimer: I think Bill Joy is an alarmist.)
Re:The real edge lies elsewhere... (Score:3, Funny)
Do you mean to suggest that Reality TV, Hum-vees, DRM, 150 year plus copyrights, mini-nukes, "intellectual property rights", and "Fair and Balanced News" aren't the right philosophical and moral ways to util
Sage Words (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sage Words (Score:5, Funny)
This may seem obvious to us today...
Apparently not:
Feel free to mod this +1 Scary.
Heh... (Score:2, Flamebait)
And now you're a techie too, huh? Like father, like son, like grandson... Good for you.
Scientific American had rejected his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'.
Too bad. Scientific American would have benefited hugely today if it just had printed the article... Imagine the commercials they could make...
The secretive W
Re:Heh... (Score:2)
Funny thing about that rejection (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Funny thing about that rejection (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously people would submit spam, so the reviewers would also have to have a "spam" (and possibly a "duplicate submission") button as well as a "reject" button.
It would provide an interesting read for all of the smaller bits of news whizzing around that none of us get to see due to the tight reviewing process.
What the future does not hold (Score:3, Insightful)
- Practical fusion energy
- Human-capable artificial intelligence
- Flying cars
- Space tourism
- The end of Moore's Law
Re:What the future does not hold (Score:3, Interesting)
Flying cars? Depends what you mean by 'car'- plenty of millionaires run helicopters; as I say depends.
End of Moore's law? We'll see.
Practical fusion energy? Good news on that front! After more than 50 years of it being 50 years away, it's now only 30 years away!
Human capable AI? See Moore's law.
Safe Nuclear Batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also a technology that nobody believes has any use because of the words "nuclear" and "radiation"
It'll come soon enough
Rename it? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Safe Nuclear Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, we can't have people throwing radioactive materials in dumpsters now.
Re:Safe Nuclear Batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Safe Nuclear Batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
How much strontium-90 is currently being produced in commerical electricy-generating nuclear reactors? (and how expensive is it to extract?)
This sort of technology has huge potential, not least of which being that it can be used to extract energy from other alpha- and beta- emitters (ie a fair chunk of nuclear waste.)
Strontium-90 isn't completely benign (it is a beta source after all, and its one radioactive decay product, Yttrium-90, I think is an even more energetic beta emitter.) It behaves chemically much like calcium, so if it's inhaled or ingested, it can be incorporated into bones, etc.
On the other hand, I get the impression that it is less dangerous than oven cleaner. You wouldn't eat that either, and like strontium-90, bare skin exposure is ill-advised.
Re:Safe Nuclear Batteries (Score:3, Informative)
I know where the edges of technology are (Score:2)
Pentium X, XYZ Ghz, super-huge hard drive, roaringly fast computer, yet still clad in crappy sheet metal from some pervert Taiwanese case manufacturer that seems bent on making products designed to hurt you
Things to Come.... (Score:3, Interesting)
(it's right around the corner, hell, we could do it now if not for those damned ethics... that's a joke, son...)
2. Sustainable Fusion
(again, right around the corner. ITER WILL work, and unlimited, non-polluting energy is here... think what that means...)
3. The Ion Drive
(already proven, power being ramped up monthly by orders of magnitude, will open up solar system for exploration, mineral harvesting, golden age begun...)
Dozens more... it's a great, great time to be alive... although many people would have you believe different.
Anti Wireless Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Wireless technologies provide endless ways to invade privacy - RFID, Credit Cards, Cell Phones, EZPass, PDA, GPS, subcutaneous transponders implanted when you walk through a mall entrance, Microsoft License activation, whatever.
Clearly the most important technology of the future will be the development of personal jammers to silence the RF nattering of the post-PC era world of gizmos carried about one's person, implanted under skin (overtly or surreptitiously) or attached into clothing. Everyone will be looking for RF cones of silence, ways to use a taser like device to EMP a wireless spybot picked up by walking into a movie theatre (or implanted by the Selective Service) or shielded pouches to prevent RF attacks on credit cards or other payment/identification devices.
If I was looking to report on bleeding edge tech, this is where I would look.
You think spyware like Gator is bad? You haven't seen nothing yet.
Re:Anti Wireless Technology (Score:2)
Perhaps flooding the air with bogus data/static would work, but wouldn't that take up quite a bit of energy?
Yes, I've had the same experience (Score:2)
I told them to report that I saw a large white commercial supersonic airliner called Concorde only yesterday and they didn't believe me either.
Here's one - cheap space flight (Score:2)
I think you're underestimating the problem. (Score:2)
Where technology appears to be magic. (Score:5, Interesting)
Genetically Modified Food (Score:2)
Social Engineering (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not going to be all that long till governments apply the same principles to "mind persuasion." Yes, the attempts in the past have been laughable, from WWII's Rationing Slogans to the War On Drugs.
But sooner or later they are going to get it right. Just look at DeBeers, who managed to invent an entire social custom wrapped around crystalized carbon. And clear, colorless crystals at that.
No imagine that persuasion in the hands of Uncle Sam.
Unbelievable article rejected (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm, and you are the great-great-grandson of Mr. Root? I wonder...the reason why all of my good slashdot story submissions get bounced every freakin' time. Maybe CmdrTaco and pals are the great-great-grandsons of those same Scientific American editors!
Your gramp was late, Ader was first (Score:5, Informative)
The French army brass, disappointed that they couldn't already have a B-52, cancelled the funding, and a bitter Clement Ader stopped his aeronautical experiments.
The real innovation introduced by the Wright brothers was an effective way of controlling the plane. The Avion was using a crude wing-warping system that didn't prove efficient. However, the Wright machine was just as unbalanced as Ader's Avion.
The steam engine was the only available motor at the time of Ader's design, and its shortcoming prevented the Avion from flying for more than a few minutes because of the water and fuel weight.
However, flight historians should say that the Wright brothers made the first powered, guided flight, wereas Ader made the first powered flight.
propeller especially (Score:4, Informative)
They also refined alot of the math behind the physics. When they first started building their test results didn't match the ones published in the standard book of tables of various aeronautic physics at the time. Turns out the guy who wrote that book was wrong about alot of things and they ended up rewriting everything, fixing equations and the like based on their empirical data gathered.
While it will undoubtedly be argued to death about what constitutes the first "flight", the wrights were far and away the first aeronautical engineers to build a working plane - and continue to build and improve them - on sound physics and principles.
Imaging immunity and virology (Score:3, Interesting)
semester have been virologists and immunologists
making real-time movies of cells under attack
(virology) and pre-empting attack (immunology).
To sit there in the audience and watch a movie
of a flu virus (tagged with a flourescent marker
to look red) tricking its way into a cell, maneurvering
to the nucleus, and attacking it, is just stunning.
And the immunologists have the same sort of
movies with dendritic cells dancing with antigens.
Yes, I realize its a long way from having the movie
to understanding the science behind the movie
sufficiently to reach the clinic, but that fact
doesn't make it any less stunning
Information. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not talking star-trek here.. let's look at what is technically feasible now, even if it's not economically viable.
Storing terabytes of information per cubic inch of some material, with picosecond access times.
Communication - Despite regulatory stifling of the internet.. the concept that if we follow standards, and cooperate, we can leverage all kinds of communication mediums, is here now. Speeds are going up and up.. the "last mile" problem is just momentary.
So.. as our ability to store and move information goes up and up.. so what?
We are getting good at digitizing things, too.
Movies. Audio.
3d scanners. Motion capture. Auto-generated 3d meshes from image analysis of 2d images...
Despite no real big noise about it now, there is ongoing progressive work in the field of image recognition.
Teleconferencing.
VoIP.
Wireless... look at what's happenign there. Look how much 802.11b stuff is changing how we think about wireless.. how many mom & pop outfits are providing services over it.. and that's a TINY, TINY slice of spectrum.. what would happen if we REALLY got serious about open wireless communcation?
Give me an ethernet jack in the back of my skull (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Biology for manufacturing. Call your "nanotech" what you will, simulating large scale mechanics at a small scale just has too many problems. However, revamp bamboo to grow me a house, or corals to grow me dishes, and we're talking something that's got a market.
2. Computer interfaces. Right now we've got a few monkeys controlling robotic arms (and world superpowers, but I digress), and there are definitely parallels to be drawn to the world of various gliders and steam powered aircraft that were burgeoning around 1903. Something with huge economic and social potential, that can completely "change the world" in the way aviation promised to, is a moderate bandwidth back that bypasses our current sensory system.
Re:Give me an ethernet jack in the back of my skul (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, sensory processing begins at the nerve endings in the sensory organs. Much of your brain's interpretation of what the eye sees is handled in the first few layers of cells in the retina.
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
That is not to say you could not produce very vivid images using this new sense. I recall an experiment where researchers were able to teach a blind man to see using pressure transducers on his back. They had a camera that would translate a signal from a black and white CCD into pressure intensities laid out like a grid. The subject was able to adapt that system into a crude form of vision. There are also reports of deaf people who "hear" by feeling the vibrations of speakers, at least enough to enjoy music.
This sense would have to be developed in people. But I could see it as a powerful tool. It would be cool if my car could translate data from proximity radar system into my brain. Instead of relying on mirrors I could "feel" the road around me. Know where the curb is. Sense that Kia in my blindspot. Vibe that cop over the next hill with the radar set.
Would it be sense like we know them? No. Instead it would be sensations the likes of which we had never known before.
Taonology (Score:3, Interesting)
Whatever methodolgies we develop for dealing with this problem is going to be the successor to the scientific method. It will also put to bed a lot of the crackpot UFO and ESP crap.
Well, at least the parts that don't pan out under scrutiny.
Re:Taonology (Score:3, Insightful)
Psychological Camoflage and Anti-camoflage? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can imagine this working in a lot of ways, some good, some not so good:
You come to an intersection in a hallway. Even though there are no signs, you are normally not a person with a good bump of direction and you are deep inside a very large building, you immediately get a feeling that left leads towards the shortest route to an emergency exit. Each time you come to another junction, this feeling adjusts to the new location.
You are outside a building. There is an unlocked door there, but unless you are supposed to go inside the building, it looks so uninteresting that you ignore it. If you were actually planning to rob the building, the door looks extremely dangerous in some ill defined way.
A highway crew re-grades a stretch of interstate, and installs some new reflective edging and lane markers. Traffic flow rate increases by 50% and traffic jams during rush hour are greatly reduced. Accident rates drop. Close observation reveals that people planning to use the exits or business bypass-loop are getting over into the best lanes much sooner than before, and are somehow more prone to pick good times to pass or make lane changes.
Obviously, if this is doable, it could also be abused:
"Our country allows free emmigration. These people could leave if they wished. Unless you think they can't see the crossing gate at the border."
"It's funny, but until I made up my mind to vote for Geefler, I hadn't even noticed those new "polling place here ->" signs. They really stand out, don't they."
While all this may sound far fetched, there are already some modest examples. Disney has built a "Tiger Hunt in India" themed ride in one of its parks, and uses decorative pictograms on a mock up crumbling ancient temple to tell a story of a race who angered the generic Disney "mother earth goddess" by ecological shortsightedness. They are punished by natural disasters, and then clean up their acts and the disasters stop happening. While most visitors don't have nearly enough time to puzzle out all the pictograms consiously, supposedly this ride has the lowest littering rate of any ride in the park.
I can see how this might become a much more robust and reliable technology, but given some of the examples, I'm not at all sure I want it to. A lot of it sounds like extensions of what some advertisers are using to overcome resistance to ads, and some of it sounds Orwellian, but either way, it may be possible to go a lot further towards mind control than most expect.
Clarke's Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:New techs? (Score:2)
How about physically increasing the size of the chip? There's plenty of room left inside the case...
YLFIRe:Stuff that Science Doesn't believe in (Score:4, Insightful)