An onboard projector.

http://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-gadgets/article/2009-08/nikon-unveils-pocket-camera-onboard-projector

Nikon’s new Coolpix S1000pj camera, however, is a theater in your pocket.

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about/

Number 85: “Don’t know what a slide rule is for…”

- should read -

“Never heard of a slide rule.”

Very slick little video.

Karthik will be happy to see that it culminates in the iPhone.  :)

I don’t even know how to categorize this…it’s just stunning.

To quote Elvis: “Technology is Cool!”

Update: So you say, “Big deal, that’s neato, but what would I use that for.”  Well take a look at this video.

That’s so cool it made me cry.

I want it.

So far only in computer simulations.  Still this is pretty cool.

One of the key nuts to crack with nanotechnology is how do you make a little motor to power these things.  You can't just shrink a motor down to nano size and have it work.  This solution builds off of several things. 

Electron Tunneling

1. Some bacteria's use of biomotors believed to be powered by proton tunneling.
2. Carbon nanotube technology to build the motor.
3. Electron tunneling

If they can build such a motor then nano-machines become much more viable.  Connecting the power supply to the motors becomes the next trick.

Main article: http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/36611

Very cool.  Arizona State University researchers are working on flexible display technologies for the US Army.

Nadeau says flexible display technology will enable new applications for the soldier and Army platforms that cannot be realized with current glass-based displays. These will include body-worn displays that conform to the uniform; displays that can be rolled up and put in a pocket when not in use and unrolled for large-area, high information content; and many other applications that Army engineers and scientists are considering.

Article here.

Here is a video illustrating the technology during some durability testing:

and some more applicable examples

http://books.google.com/books?id=R9MDAAAAMBAJ

Now that's cool, even if it is from Google.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/240672/mobile-broadband-to-hit-42mbsec-in-2009.html

wow!

In our world of ever increasing change, where bandwidth, CPU speed, memory continue to increase exponentially.  What is the long pole? --> Battery life. 

We have fantastic laptops such as this: ThinkPad X301

And yet we are still limited to mere hours of battery life.

It turns out that storing electricity is a difficult thing to do.  We've been stuck on Lithium Ion Batteries now for awhile and there has been very slow progress in improving the capacity of said batteries.

There are many teams around the globe working on the problem to increase battery life.  A team in South Korea has made a breakthrough by using Silicon instead of Graphite as the anode in the battery.

Silicon Could Give Lithium Ion Batteries 10X More Capacity

This would have far ranging and awesome impacts on all of our devices, including ones you currently own as you could conceivably go out and buy a replacement battery if/when they become available.  It also has direct impact on the viability of electric cars.

This is of course just research findings right now so don't get your hopes up.

We are living in the future.

Woman receives windpipe built from her stem cells.

Stem cells harvested from the woman's bone marrow were used to populate a stripped-down section of windpipe received from a donor, which was then transplanted into her body in June.

This needs to be automated and built into and automatic medi-doc®.

 Do you want to blow your mind?

Oh yeah I knew you did!

Go read up on the Matrioshka Brain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_Brain

Such a structure would be composed of a collection of one or more (typically more) Dyson spheres built around a star, and nested one inside another. A significant percentage of the shells would be composed of nanoscale computers (see molecular-scale computronium).

This plays an integral role in the book I'm currently reading, Accelerando by Charles Stross.

Scientists develop artificial heart that beats like the real thing

As much better than the Jarvik 7 than the Jarvik 7 was better than...well there wasn't really much before that.

The artificial heart has been tested successfully on calves and sheep, according to Professor Carpentier, and will be implanted in patients with terminal heart failure for a clinical trial in two or three years’ time.

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/?p=2873

“The greatest significance of this technique is that it provides the potential to manufacture, at a high rate and on a large scale, three-dimensional single-wall carbon nanotube electrical interconnects, without the need for high-temperature synthesis,” Srinivas Sridhar, Director of the Electronic Materials Research Institute, told PhysOrg.com.

And the law named after Gordon Moore continues apace, laughing at our arbitrary constraint of framing the doubling within the context of silicon based integrated circuits.

But the doubling of the number of transistors on an integrated circuit can be extrapolated back through time through previous technologies: Kurzweil's expansion of Moore's law.  This implies that as we reach the maximum of possible transistors due to molecular level interference there will be new technologies that come along to replace it.

3D chips are one potential direction of the paradigm shift.

This website: http://isstracker.com/ is en example of so many technologies and trends in this world, I find it beautiful.  But then I'm a geek.

1. The ISS.  I know, I know many people argue it doesn't have a compelling mission beyond just being a space station but I still think it's vital.  We are continuing and extending our knowledge about how humans can live, work and build in space.
2. Global mapping tools that are now available at our fingertips.  Like cell phone cameras, maps.live.com and maps.google.com and mapquest and all the others are now ubiquitous in our world.   Remember the Thomas guides to find where you were going? 
3. Mashups: Information and tools put into the hands of ordinary Joes.  Anybody with a modicum of skill can build this site.
4. Now we have a 2+2=5 type of equation.  And you as a member of the intertubes viewing public have an ISS live tracker system at your fingertips.  Think of that.  You don't have to be in the control center of NASA to track the space station.  You can be in your pajamas, click click click.  Oh yeah there she is, over Bermuda.

Cool.

I've read enough Kurzweil by now to never place a limit on the curiosity, ingenuity and persistence of humans.  Here is a lecture by Henry Markram talking about the IBM Blue Brain project wherein he describes the remarkable mapping and simulation of the brain that they've been able to achieve recently with the power of supercomputers.

This is the direct result of Moore's law and the inexpensiveness of powerful computers brought to bear upon unimaginably complex problems such as unraveling the workings of the brain.

What they have been able to do comes down to this.  These researchers now have the ability to model tens of thousands simulated neurons at a click of a button where it used to take months to model a neuron by manual process.

So what you say, it is still just a model.

They are using an iterative model.  Comparing how the simulated neurons behave as compared to actual behavior of neurons.  And then refining the model to become more accurate.

This is a long lecture with a LOT of information within it.

Bottom line as far as I can glean:

1. There has been lots of progress on understanding how the brain works.
2. The power of computers will revolutionize how fast this research moves forward (in much the same way mapping the genome went)
3. Researchers such as Dr. Markram. are far closer to understanding how the brains wiring works than I had thought.

Hat Tip:  Direct Neural Interface

A TV newsanchor ruins another anchor's career.  Newsworthy on its own account, but we here at techRivet are much more interested on HOW he did it.

Fired Philly TV anchor admits e-mail hacking

He hacked her email account by buying a key-logger and sniffing her passwords.

He bought a keystroke-logging device to get her passwords in August 2006, and intercepted e-mails from Lane's personal and work accounts, prosecutors said.

You live in a world where someone that in all likely-hood has the technical know-how within one standard deviation of the average computer user, has the technical savvy to know about keyloggers and effectively put one to use.

That's remarkable in many ways not the least of which would be as a caution. 

Very interesting article on the small but growing contingent of scientists doing their research out in the open using blogs and wikis to post current ongoing research.

Out in the open: Some scientists sharing results

"I think the tipping point will come when scientists look at someone next to them using the open system and getting more discoveries, and saying 'I want that.' "

And in a more general note the opening up of current papers to free readership for all can do nothing but help in the spreading of knowledge.

There are open access journals, such as those published by the Public Library of Science, but scientific journals usually require a paid subscription to get access. But in February, Harvard's largest division, the Faculty of Arts and Science, voted unanimously to make scholarly papers authored by faculty available free in an online repository, which will begin beta-testing this fall. The National Institutes of Health began an open-access policy this year requiring that NIH-funded research be posted online for free, within a year of publication.

Soon a growing array of research will be available to the layman to read.  For a geek like me that is really cool.

The article ends with a concrete example of how this openness can accelerate discoveries.

They posted their work online, but also submitted it to a journal over a year ago to be formally presented to the world's scientific community. Meanwhile, their work was incorporated into 18 different projects by other labs. Canton was invited to workshops.

Great stuff. 

Once again the relentless advance of science continues.  You may say neat, but so what.  Well if they can produce type O blood in bulk from this process then an emergency blood supply can be produced ON DEMAND.  Eliminating shortages as well as the possibility of diseased blood.

This is a big deal.

While a few red blood cells have been created from embryonic stem cells before, the ACT team is the first to mass-produce them on the scale required for medical use. They also showed that the red cells were capable of carrying oxygen, and that they responded to biological cues in similar fashion to the real thing.

I am curious if this has any impact on other treatments such as cancer.  What if you could clone someone's blood that has shown resistance to cancer growth?  There could be a source of Reverse-Typhoid-Mary blood supply.

Remarkable stories as of late.

First we have the story coming out of the Fred Hutchinson Center regarding the curing of advanced skin cancer by injecting the patient with his own cloned white blood cells (previously reported on the rivet: here).

Now we have research being conducted at Wake Forest University wherein doctors are transfusing a specific type of white blood cell from select donors into patients.  They are just beginning early human trials but the test has returned great results in lab mice.

A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

Link here.

In our long march to longer life change will appear to come slowly until all of a sudden it will appear that we are on the other side of the cure.  Then we, being the simple humans that we are, will find it unremarkable and move on as if it has always been thus.

Will curing cancer be the same as all the rest of accelerating change around us?

This is a remarkable story: Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

...and change keeps moving faster and faster.

Here's the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's webpage discussing the same case.  Not much more information.

This poll is now closed.

So, let's review this completely unscientific but interesting poll.

1. Most votes: More than 2 terrabytes of storage.  That is very interesting.  Far greater than I would have expected.  The rivet's demographic is skewed, but still quite impressive ladies and gentlemen.
2. There is a little gap between <750 gigs and >1 terrabyte.  It seems that you either got it or you don't.  Not a whole lotta gray area going on here.
3. Whoever answered "what?" needs to get with the program.

This poll was just an illustration how accelerating change has invaded our personal lives. The levels of data storage that the poll contains were corporate levels 10 years ago and government levels 20 years ago. Now you can buy a memory stick with 64 gigs on it!

You can't stop it, just gotta love it

There are a lot of indications that the little bump is over.  Is April 31 the bottom of the dollar's fall?  hmmmm...

Bringing this post back around to technology: Finance.Yahoo.com is once again is an example of the ubiquitous presence of productivity improvements given to us FREE by the power of the law of accelerating change.

Back when I was a kid, my dad handled our families investments on his own for a period of time.  This required research and reading and gathering of information.  He subscribed to Value Line which was [is] "...best known for publishing the The Value Line Investment Survey , a stock analysis newsletter that's updated weekly and kept by subscribers in a large black or green binder." [wikipedia link].

I don't know the cost, but I'm sure it wasn't free.  Apart from the fact it cost money it also had other constraints on distribution.

1. Most people had never heard of it.
2. It was mailed weekly, meaning that for any short term decision making the data was out of date before you got it .  Long term planning was of course still valid.
3. Help resources with which to interpret the charts and data were much harder to come by.

Now with finance.yahoo.com (and its competitors) we have all the information available to us that was provided by Value Line and much more.  All the stocks in all the markets evaluated in minute by minute updates (second by second?).  Experts from across the industry providing opinions on the stocks performance.  Forums on how to interpret the data.

And it's free.

Technology with these capabilities in 1985 would have been a differential advantage for an investment firm and protected as one of its chief corporate IP assets.  Now, well its available to everyone.

The flip side of the law of accelerating change is that once a technology improvement becomes ubiquitous, we, being normal humans, accept it and ignore it and absorb it as if it has always been so.

It's free and unremarkable.  That's remarkable.

The Microtransit Challenge.

This is a testament to Moore's law.

Ten years ago this was 100% science fiction.  Five years ago someone could talk about it.  2006 they held it on a lake.

This year its across the Atlantic.

...and it's at hobby prices.

One of the entrants, the Pinta, cost the competitors £2,500.  Umm...you could build it in your garage if you had the programming chops.

Big deal you say, it's just a glorified model sailboat.  Well yes and no.  Yes they look like simple little sailboats but they've got: Solar power, automated sensors, GPS positioning and course navigation software.  They obviously have a much simpler algorithm than the DARPA Grand Challenge cars, but still need to get from point A to point B.

Also this technology will be a boon to climate science.  At £2,500 a pop you can make hundreds and send them out into the oceans and go anywhere and report back anything you can imagine.  A mobile science buoy.

News Article: Pinta the robot sailing boat takes on Atlantic challenge

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.

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?

Humourous interview with some good bits and inside it.

...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!

Now 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:

• Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia
• How do astronomers find planets orbiting other stars?
• The Futurist is a big proponent of observing the accelerating change going on in many facets of our world and even in places we don't normally look. There are several entries that discuss the accelerating change that is going on in telescope technology.

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.

Terabyte Thumb Drives Made Possible by Nanotech Memory

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.

1981 1 GB IBM hard drive model 3380. Starting from $81,000 and weighed in at 34 kg.

versus

2007 1 GB smart card.  Starting at $9 and weighing in at a...well a uh...a few grams maybe?

Eh...if this isn't the most striking example of the law of accelerating returns I don't know what is.

More info:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3380#IBM_3380

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:IBM3380DiskDriveModule.agr.jpg

Hat tip: http://sd4.sd-lj.si/diggit/20yago.jpg

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 ]

I wanted to start out by saying, unbelievable, but then I realized that it is COMPLETELY believable. It was practically inevitable.

Then I said, "Actually it is unbelievable that it was inevitable...wait...that's a bit of weird logic."

Anyways. We now have available to us a standard 3.5 inch hard drive that has a 1 terabyte capacity. For the layman that is 1000⁴ = 10¹² or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Here is the full review: Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive

Being first to the terabyte mark gives Hitachi bragging rights, and more importantly, the ability to offer single-drive storage capacity 33% greater than that of its competitors. Hitachi isn't banking on capacity alone, though. The 7K1000 is also outfitted with a whopping 32MB of cache—double what you get with other 3.5" hard drives. Couple that extra cache with 200GB platters that have the highest areal density of any drive on the market, and the 7K1000's performance could impress as much as its capacity.

Unbelievable. heh.

"'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" ¹

...who controls the internet controls the present: who controls search controls the internet.

In part it's inevitable, the movement towards total loss of privacy. It is the opposite side of the coin for total transparent knowledge. Google is merely the embodiement of forces at work in society at large.

Money quote:

Interviewer: "How can you take fears away that this is a big brother company?"

....silent pause...

Marissa Mayer - VP Google Search: "I guess I just don't agree, I don't think of it that way."

This response is extraordinary in its naiveté. It is almost as if she didn't expect to be asked the question and possibly hadn't even thought about the question before...woah!

Motivation.

Marissa implies the motivation behind google's efforts to collect all the search data is non-predatory. Google only wants the data to improve the performance of their applications. I believe that is true

But what happens in the future...I mean they can say "do no evil", but then agenda's change: Google kow tows to the Chinese government and censors information., Google uses its clout to threaten politicians in North Carolina...I'm not painting Google as actually evil, I think those are business decisions, but I do think they can no longer live within their dream world of purity.

And if they are no longer the angels that they once portrayed themselves to be (if they ever were). And if they are merely a business entity trying to conquer a market and make a buck. And if their motivations are the same as the rest of the businesses in the world (which I believe they are). Then why should I trust them more than anybody else with all the information in the world?

I shouldn't.

Google Street View

As one example: Google Street View, it may show people doing private things in a very public way. [linky]. Google is within its rights to publish photos of people in public places, but what if they publish pictures of YOU that you don't want to be shown? Is that cool with you?

"They should build in privacy protection mechanisms as a matter of course," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "I don't see them proactively addressing the privacy implications of their various products, and they need to."

Because they're coming to your city...
[pics of google vehicles]

...and they ain't alone
[MS Live vs. Google]

Which brings me nicely back to the point about google merely being "the embodiement of forces at work in society at large." If Google didn't do it, someone else (Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo) would.

btw: Check out Microsoft's street side preview -it's Awesome! [Drive through the streets].

What do we do?

What can we do?

I mean to a large degree Google is an unstoppable force. Larger than most governments, curator of more information in one place than any entity before it, the consumer of more circuitry than any government or company before, the wellspring of geekdom from which all manner of widgits and tools spring as if unbidden from the hand of god.

Out of its maw comes interfaces into the information and out to the world the likes of which were not even dreamed of by futurists in decades past. No government is mandating this? They have money, they foist it on engineers and say GO FORTH AND CREATE. and it is done

.

But how do we put these multitude of genies back in the bottle?

We can't even if we wished to?

And with the rapid pace of change what does tomorrow hold in store for us?

meh.

Hang it...Google is cool

And yet the flip side is too damn compelling.
[google street view]

Maybe we are past this point. Maybe I am interjecting my 20th century sensibilities into a 21st century phenomena...

And yet who do we trust with THIS power?
[AI sooner than you think.]

Because I'm a little leary of anyone who can create that. Except of course me. You can trust me. I'll do no evil...right?

Ok, I'll bottle up that paranoia again and just enjoy all the Google doo-hickeys.

Full Google - Behind the Screen video [50 minutes] : [linky]

George Orwell, 1984 Part 1, Chapter 3, pg. 37

"Now for the Double-Sideswipe-And-Return"  heh.

..but then it isn't really off-topic, because I am using modern technology to put the movie on the rivet, it's trivial and totally cool.

They sure on their last legs those scrappy kids from Redmond.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2163005,00.asp

key graph

The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion," Ballmer told the group. "If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept.

Unbelievable. That's 1 windows installation for every 6 people in the world. Does that count the illegal copies? Does that count active versions or just all copies sold? Is Windows 3.1 in those figures? 95? I'd be ok if they are counting 98, NT, XP and Vista.

Quite an accomplishment

Here is a great article about a person with lifelong hearing loss.  Through his life he has repeatedly purchased and used hearing aids and been uniformly dissapointed.  Each one has been little more than an amplifier of sound, which doesn't really solve the problem.

Recently he got a modern cutting edge model.

And then humming.

And I asked, what’s that?

I turned to the audiologist who said, the humming is the light fixtures overhead. I looked up and it occurred to me that the world was opening up in waves around me within this tiny office. I could hear the secretary a room away on the phone and the printer printing and a phone ringing behind me, and I knew right were it was.

Wow! Right now I hear the refigerator running on the other side of the office. And I can make out the highway sounds in the background...just. This guy has NEVER heard the background sounds of life. Until now.

Go read the whole thing.

techRivet.com has been trying to stay on top of the whole Brain Computer Interface [BCI] technologies for awhile now. [here] We've even talked about NeuroSky themselves and their almost-ready-for-consumer BCI unit.

Now we can see it in action

The games look somewhat basic at the moment, but give it time. If it is anything like the Wii controller and how fast people are adapting and mod-ing its uses...well it might be an interesting phase of computer interface development coming up.

I was talking about the scale of the solar system with one of my kids and I wanted to find a picture of the Sun taken from Voyager to show how small it was.  I came across this picture.

1970's technology meets 2007.

1970's - Voyager:
Here we have one of the shining stars of the NASA space program, Voyager, sending back to Earth a composite picture of our solar system with all the planets out to Neptune captured in one amalgamation.

Brilliant.

2007 - Google:
And here I am able to go clickety click click and view the fantastic image on my own machine.

Also brilliant.

The vast store of all knowledge that is available to any person with an internet connection is immense, ubiquitous, stupefying and already taken for granted. 

My kids will never know anything different.  Will they ever have the need to open a printed encyclopedia? 

Will their research ever involve going to the school library "stacks" to find a specific tidbit of knowledge squirled away on page 743 from some obscure research scientist from Peru?

Will they even have the need to learn the Dooey Decimal System?

I would argue "no" to all three of those questions.

So everyone talks about the increasing computer speed and power, Moore's Law as it were.  But there are many technologies that are following a similar path.  One that may not have the same visibility in the press is telescope power.

There has been a rapid increase in telescopic abilities lately.  We have seen the number of extra-solar planets discovered go from 1 (which was huge news) to tens to many more than that in just a few short years.

Now comes word that NASA researchers have demostrated that they have the technological capabilities to detect an EARTH SIZE planet.  This is a remarkable development. [linky]

Even the vaunted "Futurist" looks like he has underestimated accelerating change when he stated last October: [linky]

I believe that increasingly more powerful telescopes will ensure that we discover the first genuinely Earth-like planet in another star system by 2011, and that by 2025, we will have discovered thousands of such planets.

Well, we haven't found one yet, but I feel confident to say that we should smash that 2011 estimation he made.  Accelerating change indeed.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

And by failure I mean unmitigated success.

But I do also mean failure as viewed through our Ray Kurzweil jaded shades. We expect so much out of our technology these days that a device as radical and beautiful and exemplary as the iPhone is still seen as incomplete.

Comparison

Compare it to the most radical phones of the 1990s. I'd argue it wasn't even a phone that was radical back then, but the Palm Pilot, a PDA. The Palm Pilot experimented with the user interface...how would someone work with a handheld effectively.

Compare it to the phones of the mid 1980s. Just having a mobile car phone by itself was the cool thing. Remember the bricks? Remember the mini-briefcase sized phones? 'nuff said.

Why do we not laud it for what it is

What we have here is accelerating returns personified. We are so human that we can't see what has happened. Our perception of the future is constrained by our living in the present.

The iPhone is not perfect.

It does not do absolutely evertyhing in a perfect way. It should be on a fast network. It should have more memory. It should allow us to change to competing phone networks.

What it does do is let us see what can be done, what should be done, and what will be done.

Comparing a current version of the iPod against the earlier versions gives us insight into what changes we might have in store from Apple vis a vis the iPhone. 2-3 years from now we'll be 2-3 versions in and the iPhone will have plugged its remaining product holes.

You will need to be ready for the future because it is on the way here whether you want it or not.

This just looks freaky.  My reaction is to imbue this mechanical creation with the attributes that a living animal has.  The way it moves and walks is enough like a living creature that I get a very odd feeling about it.

My primitive mamallian brain or maybe my lizard brain keeps tellimg me this is a living creature.  My Homo Sapien Brain keeps saying "no it ain't", but it can't convince my older brains.  They believe what they see, not what I tell them.

So obviously this is just experimental, but I've never seen anything like the swift kick to the side of a robot delivered by one of the researchers. That is an impressive bit of balancing going on there.

I for one welcome our new donkey-looking-noisy-weird robot overlords!

Created by Boston Dynamics. [linky]

In our modern world we take the fact that anyone can just go click-click-click and see any number of amazing pictures from the Hubble Space Tellescope.

We don't even think about how unimaginably amazing this would be for someone from 1950-60-70 even the 1980s, not to mention earlier than that.  NOBODY saw stuff like this.  And now here it is served to you on your home LCD screen.

Accelerating returns indeed.

I now end your daily Kurzweil minute with this picture.

Back in the day famous people were quoted as saying the wildest things such as:

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977

And then came the pc revolution.

Others have said likewise wildly innacurate prophesies:

Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, 1949

And then came the fab/lab revolution.

Are we now on the cusp of a new generation of technology, one that may have as significant an impact on society as the computer has had? Will it result in what we expect?

There is now a hobbyist priced fab lab that you can build in your own home. Check it out. [Fab@Home].

The estimated cost of making one of your own fab labs at home is $2,300. No precisely-machined-micrometer-lathe-turned parts required, this is apparently all possible with off-the-shelf parts.

The FabLab@Home project has been compared to the Altair 8800 which was the first computer you could build at home from a kit. [linky]

Economies of Abundance

This has many repurcussions. If you can make what you want when you want then the product of value becomes the plans on how to make it. The information. The transition from an industrial economy to an information economy shifts even further into the realm of data supremecy.

There are a lot of people doing a lot of experimenting with new interfaces. Here is an example of a photo manipulation table that looks pretty intriguing.

Related links:

• NeuroSky - brain interface
• minority report
• reactable
• Jeff Han, the magician

Basically the cliff notes on his singularity books and accelerating change.  

If you remember seeing this video:

Well Frank [linky] claims to have unleashed it upon the world. Not that he created it, but that he discovered it and blogged it and that got dugg and the rest is history.

He posted a follow up video from the professor of anthropology at Kansas State University: Michael Welsh who created the first video.  In it he explains the video.

Pretty dang cool professor Welsh, way to go.

Update: One of the professor's inspirations: We Are the Web by Kevin Kelly.

Cool accelerating change video. It has some interesting comparison statistics at the start, but then gets into some very interesing prediction stats.

None of this is new to me but the presentation is pretty gripping.