Georgia addendum

In April, a Georgian UAV was shot down by a Russian warplane over Abkhazia. Russia denied the plane was theirs until this video was made public. Oops.

Point of Contact

(A brain cell grown directly onto a microchip, the process through which all Brain-Computer Interface technology works.)

From the NY Times:

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

You really have to just see it:

Just beneath the monkeys’ skulls, the scientists implanted a grid about the size of a large freckle. It sat on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand movements. The grid held 100 tiny electrodes, each connecting to a single neuron, its wires running out of the brain and to a computer. The computer was programmed to analyze the collective firing of these 100 motor neurons, translate that sum into an electronic command and send it instantaneously to the arm, which was mounted flush with the left shoulder.

Like that cell-phone implant a few months ago, this is another example of a technology that's been steadily progressing behind the scenes for years. In both cases, announcements were only made once there was something really interesting to show the press. On one hand, this is good. It keeps the hype to a minimum until there are real results (think "Segway incident"). The flipside is that it freaks people out that we can suddenly do these things.

The thought that we'll soon be able to drive cars and operate computers without touching them, through a microchip in our brain is terrifyingly revolutionary enough that we should maybe let people warm up to it a bit before showing them cyborg-monkeys.

Warren Ellis' response (unquotable in this blog) has been my favorite.

"How Stuff Works" (of all places) has a great overview of this technology.

Dude, jetpack.

Finally, life imitates G.I. Joe.

Video of first flight:

The Daily Mail ran a story about the inventor / pilot.

Wikipedia's default entry for "Love at First Sight"

Love at First Sight

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Love At First Sight)

This article is about the Kylie Minogue song. For the phenomenon about love, see Love at first sight.

Luckily, I was trying to look up the Kylie song, so it all worked out. Anyway, I defy you to stay in a crappy mood after watching this:

Note Kylie's revealing of spatial geometry, the invisible structure of the universe. Represented here by a "grid" superimposed over the world that Kylie inhabits, it's also shown to extend out into the universe. So is Kylie's point that love reveals the secret structure of the universe? Or, more interestingly, is she comparing not being in love to the pre-Einsteinian geometry of Euclid?

Euclid was the man until Einstein came along and showed that massive objects warp space and time to such an extent that Euclidean geometry becomes useless. The distance between points expands and contracts according to the mass of the objects between those points. So is Kylie saying that in the presence of love, all of our old points of reference are useless? Well played, Dr. Minogue.

Kylie continues her exploration of non-Euclidean spacetime in the video for "come into my world".

Vampire Phone of Tomorrow, Today

Why, yes. That is a prototype cell phone implant. What powers it? Your blood. From PhysOrg:

The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

This makes sense. Oxygen and glucose carry enough energy to power the most complex system we know of, the brain, so there should be plenty left over to power your cell phone too. I wonder if this would increase your appetite? I knew blood-powered implants were being developed, but I had no idea we were anywhere near a prototype. Awesome.

You know I'm going to say it...

We live in the future.

Myths of Biofuel

(Schematic of Methyl Linoleate, a.k.a. biodiesel, a semi-energetic molecule. It's also one of the chemicals used by insects to communicate. Will widespread use of biodiesel cause a butterfly genocide? Probably not.)

Biofuel-Powered Jet Makes First Flight

Sorry to piss on Richard Branson's parade, but the coverage of this story has glossed right over the facts. The truth, as buried in a BBC "read more" piece (and mentioned nowhere in CNN's coverage):

"One of the aircraft's four engines ran on fuel comprising a 20% biofuel mix of coconut and babassu oil and 80% of the normal Jet A aviation fuel. "

Right. So despite all of the pictures of Branson juggling coconuts on the tarmac in front of the plane, giving quotes to the press on "the future of green aviation", all he did was water down the standard, petroleum-based jet fuel in ONE of the engines with 20% nut oil.

I'm all for alternatives, but stunts like this do serious damage to this cause. These are the things oil companies use to make looking for alternatives seem a waste of time. And looking for alternatives is not a waste of time. We just haven't found any good ones yet.

Biodiesel is not the silver-bullet solution for cars either. They pollute just as much as petroleum-fueled cars, it's just that their toxic by-product is not carbon dioxide. Biodiesel-fueled cars do however work well and as advertized.

Planes are a completely different story. Until we start seriously re-engineering the coconut genome, biofuels will NEVER be energetic or stable enough to power a jet. Until then, why is Richard Branson playing pretend?

Deterrence and P.R.

From CNN: "The U.S. military may try within days to shoot down a failed satellite using a missile launched from a Navy ship, officials announced Thursday":

"While much space trash and debris have safely crashed to Earth after burning up in the atmosphere on re-entry, authorities said what makes this 5,000-pound satellite different is the approximately 1,000 pounds of frozen toxic hydrazine propellant it carries."

Oye, where to start with this one? Essentially, the military is temporarily overstating the risk this satellite poses just long enough to try to destroy it with a missile, not because it's actually dangerous, but because there's a P.R. opportunity for missile defense.

Hydrazine, despite the scary name, is just hydrogen peroxide. While you probably don't want a lungfull of the stuff, we're talking about a thousand pounds that will first be incinerated by atmospheric re-entry, then, if any survives, spread and diluted by the atmosphere. Wherever you're reading this from, I guarantee there's a factory, refinery, or plant nearby dumping far worse things into the atmosphere, according to EPA regulations. Hydrazine has been used as rocket fuel since world war 2, so plenty of it has already been dumped into the atmosphere.

My favorite part:

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said there's nothing the military can do to make the outcome worse. "If we miss, nothing changes. If we shoot and barely touch it, the satellite is just barely in orbit" and would still burn up somewhat in the atmosphere, Griffin said. "If we shoot and get a direct hit, that's a clean kill and we're in good shape," he added.

Here's what happens next: either the military is able to hit and destroy the satellite seconds before it hits the atmosphere, and it becomes a big story. A reminder that despite having trouble with the low-tech stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military's still got us covered with the high-tech stuff. Or, they miss and the satellite burns up, with maybe a few chunks hitting the ocean.
In this case, the story is "we're safe, all went according to plan, and missile defense technology wasn't really designed for this kind of thing anyway". I think it's 50/50 which way it'll go.

What's conspicuously missing from the current story is that the military knows exactly where and when this satellite is coming down. They're tracking it with radar, and before they could begin putting the assets in place to attempt to shoot it down, they'd have to know exactly where it was going to be, and consequently, where it would end up. If you recall, the original story was all about how they had no idea where or when it would come down. I explained in my last entry that this didn't necessarily mean it was a threat. Somewhere between then and now, they ran the math and didn't tell anyone. Lame.

One other super-relevent piece of this story: in the first test of this technology by any country since the 1980s, China destroyed a weather satellite with a missile last year. So that's been hanging over us.

I can't wait to see what happens.

Whale stories

Of all the "designer dirigibles" profiled lately by Dezeen, my favorite by far is the "Manned Cloud":


Also, R. Douglas Fields surveys current research which asks "Are whales smarter than we are?":

From the neuroanatomical evidence she concludes that the large whale brain supports a complex intelligence that is driven by the socially complex and highly communicative lifestyle of these predators.

Mercury's cool I guess.

The Messenger probe will reach Mercury today around 2pm and immediately start sending back images. Unless it forgets to slow down or something, which is not without precedent.

Messenger took this video as it left Earth:



UPDATE: It forgot to slow down, but it was supposed to. Although the probe reached Mercury today, it's moving way too fast to just park itself in orbit. It's going to whip back out towards Venus a few more times to slow down, and eventually settle into orbit around Mercury in 2011 (!). Stupid laws of physics. No, no, I love them.

Mars is safe...for now.

Risk of Mars impact now 1 in 10,000.

Meanwhile, having successfully navigated the asteroid belt, NASA's "New Horizons" probe snaps this picture of Jupiter and its moon Io (with an erupting volcano) on its way to Pluto:

The Question, 2008

Every year, the Edge Foundation asks the world's smartest people one question. This year's: "What have you changed your mind about? Why?".

This takes days to read, but my favorite answers so far are "The Handicap Principle", "Mother Nature is not our friend", "Why men are at the top", and "Taking the Posthuman Era Seriously".

My former Professor (and great inspiration) Carolyn Porco articulates the point of this blog in her answer:

"When the truth becomes problematic, when intellectual honesty clashes with political expediency, when voices of reason are silenced to mere whisper, when fear alloys with ignorance to promote might over intelligence, integrity, and wisdom, the very practice of science can find itself imperiled. At that point, can darkness be far behind?"

Yo, what she said.

Things I miss about the 90's: Trip Hop

The whole genre seems to be about going to Europe and seducing and/or assassinating people, back when that kind of thing was so absurd that it was romanticized by icy soprano-vixens and not, like, our foreign policy. Anyway:

Hooverphonic - This Strange Effect


Hooverphonic - 2wicky

Massive Attack - Angel


Tricky - Christiansands


Mono - Life in Mono


Esthero - Heaven Sent

Post-Concorde

The Concorde may be extinct, but NASA and Virgin Airlines are working together to develop a passenger space-plane. It looks like an evil flying squirrel:

Not that I'm complaining. The X-43 (until it gets a better name) will fly from New York to London in an hour. In November, a test craft hit Mach 9.6 (about 7,000 mph):



Some background on the concept:


Yo, we live in the future.

My generation did this:

"Avenging Narwhal" product description:
"The narwhal is an arctic-dwelling whale that's been called "the unicorn of the sea" due to its long pointed tusk. While there's much debate about the true purpose of this appendage, the truth is finally revealed! The narwhal uses its mighty tusk to skewer the cute smaller animals of the world… specifically baby seals, baby penguins, and koalas."

It's the koala that makes it art.

I don't know which part of this story I love most

I guess the part where something happened on my birthday that required use of the phrases "comet", "rocket", and "classified satellite".

From Space Weather re: weird, comet-like blaze in the sky last night:

"This cloud mimicking Comet 17P/Holmes is fuel dumped from the upper stage of an Atlas rocket that launched a classified satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office on Dec. 10th. The event created a splendid display for about 50 minutes and then faded into the night."

Video

There are over 900 satellites orbiting the Earth right now.

Want to see?