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SEE not infer. The technology does not use glass lenses nor reflective mirrors but an advanced form of a pinhole camera, the "pinhole" technique is called Fresnel zone plates. New Scientist article. The technical hurdles would be tricky but nothing unbelievable. Essentially we would need to launch two spacecraft.: one is the "lens" and one is the "receptor". The focal point using the Fresnel method is kilometers away from the lense, ergo the two spacecraft solution. Go read the whole article, just fascinating. Feeds right into this post: Planet Hunting, The Next Generation - The Lyot Project
At first you may think Clay Shirky is stretching the analogy between the industrial revolution and the interactive computer experience of the 21st century, commonly called Web 2.0. But as he continues and fleshes out his argument in the second half of the video, and especially the example of the 4 year old, I flipped my interpretation and thought the industrial revolution example may still be the wrong analogy, but because it is not STRONG enough.
if the video doesn't show, right click and click on play in the context menu. A couple of key quotes: On comparing WOW and Gilligan's Island:
"However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure out if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter." Television is the "heat-sink" of cognitive surplus:
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation." Another quote:
"I was arguing that this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into." You can read the whole text at his website: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus ht: Clay Shirky on the cognitive surplus
Charlie Martin makes some fairly straightforward "in-the-box" predictions about the power of computing coming in the next ten years. Even so there are some remarkable facts buried in the article. What Will Your Next Computer Be Able to Do? We haven’t talked about networks much yet, but the same kind of rule applies to them as we’ve applied to computers: the total speed of the network at the house should go up by between 16 and 32 times in ten years. My cable modem: 8 gigabits a second, at least in theory. My home network in 2018: 128 gigabits a second, or call it 12 gigabytes a second. That’s a whole HD movie in around 5 seconds.
In this day and age where he have memory cards approaching 64 gigabytes in size and hard drives in the terabyte plus range, we here at techRivet research were curious to find out how much personal storage our readers have. so...tell us...please.
This is fascinating. We have a private Space Race fully underway. Several companies pursuing several different strategies. A couple, like Virgin Galactic, are promoting space tourism with a sub-orbital flight. SpaceX is looking to create ISS capable rockets. Bigelow is looking create space hotels. Heinlein would love it right now. Anyways check out the pictures of the construction of SpaceShip Two. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4256017.html
As we relentlessly march into the future scientists continue to discover stuff about stuff. And you know what we don't forget the stuff we already knew about stuff. That is the law of accelerating change in a nutshell. Some of the stuff we learn about stuff we had to already know about some other stuff before we could figure out the new stuff about stuff. You follow? Now some fairly bright scientists at Harvard have come across a technique for "starving" cancer cells and thereby curbing their growth. When the researchers forced cancer cells to switch to the other form of pyruvate kinase in the lab by knocking out production of PKM2, the cells' growth was curbed. This is a novel technique that science had to first understand the process behind cancers explosive growth before the solution could even be looked for. This is not a treatment yet, but could open up new avenues to combat the disease[s].
 Mind-Reading Game Headset to Hit Market
Brain computer interface is coming. And it's coming fast. There are several companies set to hit the market with products over the next couple of years: Emotiv and NeuroSky. Both of these products are focusing on the gaming market segment to begin with. There they have a ready customer, willing to spend money on accessories, looking for new gadgets and typically younger, typically male. If done correctly the experience gained from entering that market could lay the groundwork for many other segments: quadraplegics, fighter pilots, surgeons, artists, equipment operators, data/security experts. Eventually how about an everyday person in a wired world...
Eyes on prize: Visionary device gives hope Once again our good friend accelerating change comes around to help us out. This near achievement is only possible because of all the surrounding improvements and miniaturization in computers and silicon chip construction in general. “There has been this explosion of interest in this field because basically the technology in the last 20 years has become miniaturized enough and sophisticated enough so that for the first time we can imagine building something small enough to put in the eye,” said Dr. Joseph Rizzo III, who founded the project in the late 1980s and co-directs the 36-member team. What will be next.
I was just having this conversation with my brother. Essentially Hard Drives have overshot their market segment. They consistently provide more and more storage capacity and have now exceeded the needs of their customers. Do you really need a terabyte in your home? Unless you are ripping your entire DVD collection (ummm...not legal right now) to your HD, you are probably fine with a couple of 120gig drives. Enter solid state. Quieter, more energy efficient, better I/O. ...and now you can get them up to 128gig: Toshiba to Offer 128 GB Flash Drive done and done.
Once again the modern technology available to us today that just simply wasn't 20 years ago...or 10...or heck 18 months ago is remarkable. Cancer researchers believe that further engineering the shape or surface properties of nanoparticles can enable the particles to actively target tumors, and thereby maximize their diagnostic or therapeutic function at the cancer site, while minimizing collateral damage to healthy tissue This is merely the beginning, for this early nanotech being tested is for better, more targeted deployment of current medicines. "We're not trying to re-invent every aspect of the science," said Seth Feuerstein, president of Carigent Therapeutics in New Haven, Conn. "We focus on delivering current drugs better, and we're also working with companies whose drugs haven't yet been approved, to help make them more effective." It may remain primarily a deployment mechanism, but even so this could be a harbinger of the end of chemotherapy. I know two people in chemo right now and for medical science to be creating the technology to avoid that fate is welcome news. My opinion, and it is only that, is nanotech will become one of the most useful tools available when treating cancer.
Free. Probably available this month. Made Robert Scoble cry. WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.  Official WorldWide Telescope site:
you can zoom in and zoom and zoom and zoom... It stitches together views from all the best telescopes in the world... It's "like a magic carpet ride". Technology rocks. We are living in the age of miracles.
 Excita bytes! Xtreeeeem Bytes!
An exabyte is one-quintillion byte unit of information. That is equivalent to 50,000 times the size of the Library of Congress. The amount of data that is flying around the Internet right now is measured in that scale. This opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out a bunch of fascinating statistics, this one caught my eye. Cisco's newest video-conferencing system requires 15 megabits per second in each direction. A one-hour conference call could thus produce 13.5 gigabytes, which is more than a high-definition movie. Just 75 of these Cisco conference calls would equal the entire Internet traffic of the year 1990. ...75 video conference calls == the entire Internet traffic of 1990. Admittedly there weren't a whole lotta people on the Internet for that time, but still..75 calls. My previous company did that many video conference calls by themselves in a month, maybe in as short a time frame as a week...and that was a company of about 200. It's not stopping here folks, you realize that don't you? There are 1 Billion people connected...there are 5 Billion people not connected....even a simple arithmetic operation is staggering let alone an exponential one. We have not idea what we will be using computers for and how integrated they will be in our lives in 10 years...heck 5 years may be too long. Are you ready for the ride?
 ...Commercial...Space...Station...
Look, I don't mean to keep talking about all this accelerating change and stuff, but I really think we're on the verge of something here. 1. We have Virgin Galactic releasing their spaceship design and preparing for launches at some undetermined time. 2. We have SpaceX developing a new cost effective rocket system with the intent to be the only ISS supportable US based space system at the time the Shuttle fleet is finally grounded. They have already had two launches and have several scheduled this year. And now this news from Bigelow. Bigelow Aerospace and Denver-based United Launch Alliance (ULA) have been working together for over a year studying what it would take to human-rate the Atlas 5 rocket. Industry sources said Bigelow Aerospace is ready to place an order that includes six launches starting in 2011 to begin assembly and early operation of the new station. We live in unprecedented times in so many ways this is merely one more manifestation of the change that is taking place all around us.
 Accelerating change is going on all around us. We see it in entertainment from computer games to movies. We see it in telephones as they keep getting smaller and more feature rich. We see it in cameras and music players and personal GPS devices. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
All of this creeps into our lives and becomes ubiquitous. The changes quickly becomes invisible, expected and, in a weird sort of way, un-important. But accelerating change is also affecting the sciences. For example the hunt for extra-solar planets. The first one discovered was in 1991. Since then there has been a rapid pace of discovery. The bulk of the discoveries essentially done by inference: careful detection of the wobbling of the star around which the planet[s] orbit.  So the point here is that before 1991 we had NO evidence of planets orbiting other stars. In theory we were 100% sure (or so close as to make no difference) that most stars had some planets, but we had no direct evidence. Now there has been over 250 planets identified. But wait that's not all! N ow there is a new technology under development by the Lyot Project, it's goal to create the necessary instrument and associated software to remove starlight from images thus allowing the much fainter planets to be viewed directly. Astronomers will no longer need rely on inference to discover new planets. This would be a remarkable achievement and would allow for a much greater number of planets to be discovered. It would probably also allow for the discovery of Earth like planets and the reading of spectrums from the planets themselves. What would the reactions be if we found a planet with a spectral analysis that matched Earth? Orbit, temperature, water, oxygen?... Would that spur some research into a viable star probe? Just asking... Accelerating change is cool. Sites of interest:
To paraphrase Austin Powers - "Yay Capitalism!" I think there is a remarkable group of efforts going on right now in the world of space technologies. And all of it is being spearheaded by private companies. Not by huge governments. Where NASA is struggling to set a roadmap and plan for hundreds of different missions, here we have small nimble private corporations creating solutions to problems. Here is Armadillo Aerospace attempting to capture the Lunar Lander X-Prize. They're sponsored by nVidia, which to me seems a cool corporate investment. Google is in the act as well. The next couple of decades could be very interesting. I would like to wholeheartedly encourage the multitude of high-tech billionaires that read the Rivet to invest in the emerging private space race. C'mon you already have 3 Ferraris, what's left? How about a moon base. Related articles: SpaceX Flight Review
Nothing really new here but it is interesting that the mainstream press is picking up on this now. In the Future, Smart People Will Let Cars Take Control Stanford computer scientist Sebasian Thrun makes this prediction: In five years he expects a car that could take over simple chores like breezing along an expressway, inching along in stop-and-go traffic, or parking in the lot at a mall or airport after dropping off the driver. In 20 years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning over these chores to a computer techRivet had a similar article earlier: Autonomous Cars will change urban living
 Beautiful.
While there are plenty of pie in the sky nano-technology dreams out there: space elevator ribbon, artery cleansing robots, oxygen increasing blood. But in reality those are still far off. What we will end up seeing in our day to day lives will be more mundane applications that appear to have marginal impact on change, but over the long term may have as much impact as the grandiose ideas. For example here: Nano-layered plastic sheet is strong as steel This stuff could be used in a lot of applications ranging from grocery bags to space vehicle linings. It will all depend on how efficient the process can become. It sounds like the process uses simple materials and that there is potential for big automation. It will be very interesting to see what other "mundane" nano-technology innovations come out over the next several years.
This is quite cool: Fab at Home, Open-Source 3D Printer, Lets Users Make Anything A Fab at Home kit costs around $2400. Lipson compares it to early kit computers such as the MITS Altair 8800, which democratized computer technology in the 1970s. At-home fabrication, Lipson says, “is a revolution waiting to happen.” As for that robot? Wait a year, he says, and it really will walk out of the machine. Here is their homepage: Fab@Home So, while we may not be making our chicken soup in a fabber anytime soon, how about a replacement flashlight...or a toaster [my toaster just gave up the ghost this morning]. Download the plans, pour in the raw material, switch the machine on, snap the finished parts together, plug in the wall and toast bread. We've got a ways to go.
When? I don't know but it is remarkable how far the scientists and researchers and engineers have come in just a few short years. DARPA held the first Grand Challenge in 2004. An off-road course to challenge a fully autonomous robotic car. Not one car finished. Most failed within the first few miles. DARPA ran the same challenge a year later. 5 cars finished and most of the rest of the field improved on previous results. This year DARPA ran a new challenge, the Urban challenge. Designed to replicate an Urban experience. It was won by the team from Carnegie Mellon University. Tether said Tartan's vehicle averaged about 14 miles per hour throughout the course, which covered about 55 miles. Stanford averaged about 13 miles per hour, and Virginia Tech averaged a bit less than that. In response to a question from the press, Tether said that MIT came in fourth place. Remarkable. Carnegie Takes First in DARPA's Urban Challenge. I had read about efforts to automate car driving years ago. Typically it involved very expensive retrofits to our existing roads to provide the guidance to the cars. That was before the computational power we have now was available and before GPS was so widespread. The computing power now takes up the entire back of a Passat station wagon. The sensors are ungainly attachments bolted on the roof. This will change, this will shrink. It will become ubiquitous and invisible and accepted and expected. You will be able to get in your car, type in your location to Google Maps. turn your seat around and surf the web or perhaps chat with a co-passenger. Because there won't be a driver anymore. Why would you want to drive a car? That's so 2007?
So you've probably seen this chart or one like it: 
We aren't holding tightly to Moore's law which states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. But we are holding a line that is close. And that's pretty cool but the human brain looks at that and says, "big deal...it's getting faster...so what?" Let's take a look at that chart in a way that the human brain can clearly see what "doubling" does over time. Here is a representation of Moore's law (not the actual observations) changed into an arithmetic scale. [click on the image to see a larger view] 
This stretches across the time frame from 1981 to 2021. It is only approximate, but does illustrate what is actually going on when we speak of doubling the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. Oh and by the way...the knee there, where the graph turns north? That's 2007- 2009. This also explains why the graph of Moore's law is displayed in logarithmic scale. We quickly run out of paper. If I stretch it backwards to 1970 and forward to 2040 and want to still have something intelligent to read...well, that becomes a big graph.
 Would Deep Thought have been so dismissive about the new supercomputer from NEC? The NEC SX-9 Vector Supercomputer System. (Although Milliard Gargantubrain is a much cooler name for a super computer.)
- Consisting of 16 nodes.
- Capable of a peak vector performance in excess of 100 GFLOPS.
- Available in six colors including periwinkle.
The SX-9 is the current fastest supercomputer in the world. It closes in on the PFLOPS range. World's fastest vector computer goes live. Update: Ok I lied about the colors, you can only get it in black.
There's a new article at the Washington Post that talks about Aubrey de Grey's effort to end aging. He has made the famous statement that the first person to live to 1000 years of age is alive today. What if the only certainty is taxes? How many people are in favor of malaria? anyone? Of course nobody thinks malaria is a good thing. Well one of Aubrey's points is that human aging shares the primary negative characteristic with malaria which is that it KILLS people. Only aging kills VASTLY MORE people. Smart guy. Compelling arguments. Reasoned thinking. Essentially, his argument is this. The rate of improvement in therapies will stay ahead of the rate of aging. You will get incrementally better treatment year over year, decade over decade and simply stay ahead of the curve. Even without a radical revolutionary technology, the evolution of improved technologies will keep you ahead of the curve.
I was wrong...I know, I know what you're thinking, it is crazy isn't it. But when I said back here: [Accelerating Change and MP3 Players] that a 2 Gigabyte MP3 player would look like this: I was wrong. this: in 2011, will likely be a terabyte mp3 player. Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years. Unbelievable. But only in a totally believable way. This is a result of accelerating change in its purest form. Here we have Michael Kozicki, director of ASU's Center for Applied Nanoionics, a field that probably didn't even exist 5 years ago and certainly 10 years ago, taking the breakthroughs in one avenue of research and applying it to another. The beauty of it is, this doesn't need to be a whole new form of technology, this new memory can be made with much of the same technologies as what is currently in use in the industry. Kozicki says the technology can be built from materials commonly used in the memory industry, which should help keep manufacturing costs down. Remarkable.
 Remember "Total Recall", the sci-fi movie from 1990? Great movie, Arnie was at the peak of his action hero era, Sharon Stone was Hot, Michael Ironside was bad, lot's of gratuitous violence.
yeah...coool. Well the opening scene had Sharon and Arnie eating breakfast and the entire wall of their dining area was a television. They turned on and off parts of it. Now it's a television, now it's a tranquil screensaver (wallsaver?). Well Sony is just about to come out with an ultra thin TV. The next generation television has a screen with a thickness of just three millimeters (0.12 inches), which was made possible because the organic display is self-luminescent and does not require a backlighting. [linky] So...less than a quarter inch thick. You could tile your wall with these things and voila', life imitates art. Of course they're like $2000 per right now, but that price will come down. Oh...ok, only because you asked. CHICK FIGHT!
 Quantum chip rides on superconducting bus
The connection of two Qubits on a chip for the first time. This is a crucial first step, a proof of concept, that will lead to true quantum computers. In effect, says Johannes Majer, a member of the Yale team, the researchers have created "a quantum bus". A bus is used in conventional computers as a conduit for information among the various components – but its quantum chip equivalent has never been made before. With the predictions for the end of Moore's law I refer you back to Ray Kurzweil's great essay on accelerating change that stipulated the doubling of computing power was not bound to the integrated chip. The phenomena both preceded the integrated chip and will in all likelihood continue after the silicon chip is no longer viable. The creation of a working quantum computer might be as momentous an event as the creation of the transistor. History will of course judge.
 Just an example of accelerating change.
There were rooms and devices in history that could be categorized as planetariums dating back to the 13th century, but the first true planetarium was created in Munich in 1920. [ref. linky] [wikipedia] That planetarium used a metal dome with holes poked in it to project the lights onto a domed ceiling. This technology remained largely unchanged for 60 years. Since then we have seen rapid change. With computer processing power increasing continuously it is now possible to provide dynamic content up onto  the dome. I went to a local planetarium last year and the experience was more like a trip through space than a lecture from an instructor. It was remarkable. But it doesn't stop there. We now have sophisticated programs available to everyone for free that exceed the capabilities of ANY planetarium that was built before the year 2000. Stellarium [linky] is only the most sophisticated example. The power of a full planetarium placed in your hands for free. Accelerating Change: This is only one trivial example of accelerating change in our lives. We have the capabilities at our fingertips that only large institutions have had in the past. And even those institutions, whether business or government, have only had THOSE capabilities for a hundred years or so, before that essentially nobody could do these things. And we take it all for granted. We shouldn't. We live in an age of miracles. It is not an age of once in a blue moon someone gets healed by some mysterious means or someone walks on water or something trivial like that. It is an age where the miracles are so common and ubiquitous that they have become mundane.
 Ok so it's only for three people, but Bigelow Aerospace is committed to having their Sundancer module launched before 2010.
This is private enterprise at its best. Let's review. Paul Allen is involved with Space Ship One / Scaled composites.
Richard Branson also.
...and Northrop Grumman buys the company. Elon Musk is working hard with SpaceX on the Falcon project. Successfully launching a Falcon earlier this year. Impressive in most accounts. He has revenue coming in from scheduled launches of satellites (whether that covers his costs is unlikely). And now we have the ambitious plan of Bigelow Aerospace. This is an unprecedented influx of private industry into the space exploration realm. The design of the Bigelow modules are very innovative...they inflate once in space. As long as the interior is sufficiently safe, this is a very cool evolution. Space stations cubic interior space would no longer be limited by the carrying volume of the launch spacecraft. If it is scalable, it would make vastly bigger constructs possible in space. More info: [cosmic blog ]
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