Random Fate

Another item for the “not related to poltics” bin…

This is pretty damn cool:

Spirit rover sits atop Martian summit

When I start to get down because of all the bad news I see, all the hatred, all the insanity, I remember that we can also do great things.

Corporations have rights that over-ride those of real people?

In the interests of full disclosure - I work at creating IP (intellectual property) and therefore am among those who might be affected by the outcome of this legal wrangling.

As Shaggy would say, "Zoinks!!!":

Legal argument could hamper high-tech job-changers
Published: August 26, 2005, 12:29 PM PDT

By Ed Frauenheim
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Buried in Microsoft's lawsuit against its former executive Kai-Fu Lee and Google is a legal doctrine that could make tech professionals shiver.

The high-profile dispute largely hinges on a noncompete agreement Lee signed with Microsoft. But in court filings, the software giant has also mentioned the theory of "inevitable disclosure," which holds that in some circumstances people can't avoid sharing or relying on trade secrets from their former employer when moving to a competitor.

Thanks to this increasingly popular legal argument, techies and other employees could be in for a surprise when they try to switch companies. In states that accept the inevitable disclosure concept, employers can sue defectors even if they've signed only a confidentiality agreement--or even if they haven't signed an employment agreement at all, said Robin Meadow, an attorney with the firm Greines Martin Stein & Richland.

"It's sort of an unwritten noncompete contract, in effect," Meadow said. "The fact that you haven't signed something doesn't mean you're safe when you move to another company."

Chief scientists and engineers at high-tech companies, as well as executives, are particularly vulnerable to the inevitable disclosure argument, according to Martin Foley, an attorney with the law firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal. Courts making inevitable disclosure rulings tend to bar a worker from a new position for a year or less, but the concept conceivably could keep someone from taking a new job in their field forever, Foley said.

"Inevitable disclosure is ultimately, potentially, a form of indentured servitude, if it's applied in an extreme manner," Foley said.

A few years ago, Foley himself helped convince a California court of appeals to reject the inevitable disclosure doctrine. But it has been upheld in federal court. Employer suits that call on the inevitable disclosure doctrine are on the rise and now number in the hundreds each year, said Johnny Taylor, partner at the law firm McGuireWoods. It's difficult to say how many state courts have ruled in favor of at least a limited version of inevitable disclosure.

"It's become a trend," said Taylor, also chair of the Society for Human Resource Management professional group. "This theory or doctrine is taking hold."

Read the entire story.

Did Shakespeare really have it so right centuries ago when he wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI -Part 2, Act IV, Scene II)?

Where do the "rights" of "corporations" or "companies" (constructs of legal fiction, at best) end and the rights of an individual to have gainful employment in his or her chosen profession begin?

Is the "intellectual property" gambit of corporations getting out of hand, as evidenced both by this legal wrangling along with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was essentially written by corporations?

We have known for quite a while that money has had an overweening influence on lawmaking in the United States. Has it finally crossed the line to where corporations now have more "rights" than citizens, including the "right" to keep individuals from being able to find and hold jobs in their profession?

Technorati Tags: politics, science, science & technology, science and technology, technology

More developments in sensor technology

Almost a week ago, I briefly discussed how the world of sensors isn't the one you see on television, certainly not what you see on any incarnation of Star Trek.

This doesn't mean there isn't a lot of new sensor technology coming down the pike, though.

First, a passive sensor that can image a wide variety of objects. A passive sensor doesn't require a probe such as a radio wave (aka RADAR) or a laser beam (as mentioned in my previous post) or X-rays for detection. While the terminology isn't common, I typically refer to active sensors as "scanners" instead, to give a clear differentiation.

Sensor Could Detect Concealed Weapons Without X-rays

Source: Ohio State University
Date: 2005-08-18

COLUMBUS , Ohio - A new sensor being patented by Ohio State University could be used to detect concealed weapons or help pilots see better through rain and fog.

Unlike X-ray machines or radar instruments, the sensor doesn't have to generate a signal to detect objects - it spots them based on how brightly they reflect the natural radiation that is all around us every day.

There is always a certain amount of radiation - light, heat, and even microwaves - in the environment. Every object - the human body, a gun or knife, or an asphalt runway - reflects this ambient radiation differently.

Paul Berger, professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at Ohio State and head of the team that is developing the sensor, likened this reflection to the way glossy and satin-finish paints reflect light differently to the eye.

Once the sensor is further developed, it could be used to scan people or luggage without subjecting them to X-rays or other radiation. And if the sensor were embedded in an airplane nose, it might help pilots see a runway during bad weather.

The Ohio State sensor isn't the only ambient radiation sensor under development, but it is the only one Berger knows of that is compatible with silicon - a feature that makes it relatively inexpensive and easy to work with.

This compatibility with silicon is key.

The computer you are using to read this now is a product of decades of development in the manipulation of silicon.

Here is some perspective: It is a part of my job every day to build structures on silicon and out of silicon that are smaller than the average influenza virus. These structures contain films that are five atoms thick.

And I'm expected to come up with ways of doing this that are inexpensive enough that you can buy your cell phone for less than $20, a handheld piece of disposable equipment with more processing power than the computers used to help design the first atomic bomb or navigate or the moon.

From January of this year, another development that is an outgrowth of the techniques we have developed to make computer chips smaller and faster:

Tiny, Atom-based Detector Senses Weak Magnetic Fields

Source: National Institute Of Standards And Technology (NIST)
Date: 2005-01-07

A low-power, magnetic sensor about the size of a grain of rice that can detect magnetic field changes as small as 50 picoteslas - a million times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field - has been demonstrated by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in the Dec. 27 issue of Applied Physics Letters,* the device can be powered with batteries and is about 100 times smaller than current atom-based sensors with similar sensitivities, which typically weigh several kilograms (about 6 pounds).

The new magnetic sensor is based on the principles of a NIST chip-scale atomic clock, announced in August 2004. Expected applications for a commercialized version of the new sensor could include hand-held devices for sensing unexploded ordnance, precision navigation, geophysical mapping to locate minerals or oil, and medical instruments.

Like the NIST chip-scale clock, the new magnetic sensor can be fabricated and assembled on semiconductor wafers using existing techniques for making microelectronics and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This offers the potential for low-cost mass production of sensors about the size of a computer chip. When packaged with associated electronics, the researchers believe the mini magnetometer will measure about 1 cubic centimeter or about the size of a sugar cube.

---
*P. Schwindt, S. Knappe, V. Shah, L. Hollberg, J. Kitching, L. Liew, J. Moreland. "Chip-scale atomic magnetometer." Applied Physics Letters. 27 Dec. 2004

Perhaps that tricorder on Star Trek isn't so far-fetched after all...

Technorati Tags: science & technology, science and technology, technology

It doesn't mention anything about hairy palms, though

From The Economist (sorry, subscription required, but it's worth it!):

Cor blimey
Aug 18th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Gory and erotic images can affect your vision

IT'S true. Pornography can make you blind. Look at a smutty picture and, according to research by Steven Most, of Yale University, and his colleagues, you will suffer from a temporary condition known as emotion-induced blindness.

Dr Most made this discovery while studying the rubbernecking effect (when people slow down to stare at a car accident). Rubbernecking represents a serious lapse of attention to the road, but he wondered if the initial reaction to such gory scenes could cause smaller lapses. The answer is, it does. What he found was that when people look at gory images - and also erotic ones - they fail to process what they see immediately afterwards. This period of blindness lasts between two-tenths and eight-tenths of a second. That is long enough for a driver transfixed by an erotic advert on a billboard to cause an accident.

Hmmm... this might explain a LOT.

Dr Most thinks that the explanation for this temporary blindness is that there is an information-processing bottleneck in the brain when it is presented with important stimuli. When the human brain was evolving, such stimuli would not have been two-dimensional images. They would, rather, have been part of the real world. Gory scenes would have had survival value (ie, "am I going to be next?"), while erotic ones would have had reproductive value. Paying attention to the landscape would have been a distraction.

In the age of photography, though, it is the image that is the distraction, and if the distracted individual is traveling at speed in a car, such distraction could be fatal. So the team carried out a second series of experiments, still unpublished, that were intended to discover whether their subjects could override this emotion-induced temporary blindness by using what they rather grandiloquently called an "attentional strategy" (ie, focusing harder on the target image). This was arranged by asking the subjects to find not any rotated photo, but a rotated photo of a building, in the array of images. The fact that they had to pay attention to both content and orientation meant they focused harder. As the researchers had expected, in this version of the experiment subjects were, on average, better at spotting the target image.

But that average concealed some interesting differences that depended on a subject's personality. The researchers knew from previous studies that the more neurotic someone is, the worse he is at controlling his attention, so they decided to see how a measure of neuroses known as the harm-avoidance scale correlated with their results. The harm-avoidance scale is a measure of a person's reaction to negative or frightening stimuli. They found that the lower a subject's score on this scale was, the more successful he was at detecting the target. This information might be useful when considering the reliability of witnesses to crimes.

Interesting, even, dare I say, fascinating...

Technorati Tags: humor, science, science & technology, science and technology

More on carbon nanotubes

In a continuation of my recent post on carbon nanotubes:

Nanotubes show their strength in numbers
Super-strong sheets could be used in future screens and surfaces

By Kathleen Wren
Science
Updated: 4:07 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2005

WASHINGTON - Carbon nanotubes, the wunderkind molecules of the nanoworld, are finally showing strength in numbers. Researchers have now made large nanotube sheets that have many of the same star qualities as the prima donna-like single molecules, bringing the promises of nanotechnology a step closer to reality.

The flexible, transparent sheets can conduct electricity and emit light or heat when a voltage is applied, leading their creators to propose that our car windows and the canopies of military aircraft could contain nearly invisible antennae, electrical heaters for defrost, or informative optical displays.

These sheets, which are presently several meters long but could potentially be much larger, might also be useful in everything from flexible computer screens that could be rolled into a sack, to light bulb-like devices providing uniform lighting, to strong sails that could be propelled in space by sunlight.

"When you have a remarkable material, it's easy to make advances in terms of applications," said Ray Baughman of the University of Texas, Dallas, who led the research team that made the nanotube sheets. The scientists report their findings in the 19 August issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

I will make a prediction; it is always dangerous to prognosticate, but I am confident in what I am writing here.

We are leaving the research phase with carbon nanotubes into the development phase. Many new technologies will be appearing in the next decade that use this molecule set.

You thought the progress in microelectronics and communications in the past few decades were revolutionary. The use of these carbon-nanotube molecules has the potential to be even larger.

I am not prone to hyperbole, so take this as you will.

Technorati Tags: nanotubes, carbon nanotubes, science, science & technology, science and technology, technology

"We seem to have a botwar on our hands"

This sounds like something from a cyberpunk science fiction novel:

Computer virus writers at war, security firm says

News Story by Reuters

AUGUST 17, 2005 (REUTERS) - HELSINKI, Finland -- Computer worms that have brought down systems around the world in recent days are starting to attack each other, Finnish software security firm F-Secure Corp. said today.

"We seem to have a botwar on our hands," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. "There appear to be three different virus-writing gangs turning out new worms at an alarming rate, as if they were competing to build the biggest network of infected machines."

Hypponen said in a statement that varieties of three worms -- Zotob, Bozori and IRCbot -- were still exploiting a gap in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 operating system on computers that had not had the flaw repaired and were not shielded by firewalls.

"The latest variants of Bozori even remove competing viruses like Zotob from the infected machines," Hypponen said.

In the larger scale of things, while this is creating disruption, it is nothing compared to the lives that are lost every day to hatred and stupidity.

Yet, this adds to the feeling that things are going too fast, running off the rails, barreling towards a wreck we do not want but are not taking any action to avoid.

As the world population rises and technology improves, the complexity inherent in the interaction of various societies, cultures, sub-cultures, and other groups increases, misunderstandings grow, and the potential to do harm blooms geometrically.

Is the human race wise enough to survive?

Nanotubes and buckyballs and diamonds and life - carbon doing its thing...

From Wired News:

Nanotubes May Heal Broken Bones

By Aaron Dalton

02:00 AM Aug. 15, 2005 PT

Human bones can shatter in accidents, or they can disintegrate when ravaged by disease and time. But scientists may have a new weapon in the battle against forces that damage the human skeleton.

Carbon nanotubes, incredibly strong molecules just billionths of a meter wide, can function as scaffolds for bone regrowth, according to researchers led by Robert Haddon at the University of California at Riverside. They have found a way to create a stronger and safer frame than the artificial bone scaffolds currently in use.

More carbon nanotube developments from ScienceDaily:

Customized Y-shaped Carbon Nanotubes Can Compute

August 14, 2005 -- Researchers at UCSD and Clemson University have discovered that specially synthesized carbon nanotube structures exhibit electronic properties that are improved over conventional transistors used in computers. In a paper published* in the September issue of Nature Materials and released online on August 14, UCSD Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professors Prabhakar Bandaru and Sungho Jin, graduate student Chiara Daraio, and Clemson physicist Apparao M. Rao reported that Y-shaped nanotubes behave as electronic switches similar to conventional MOS (metal oxide semiconductor) transistors, the workhorses of modern microprocessors, digital memory, and application-specific integrated circuits.

"This is the first time that a transistor-like structure has been fabricated using a branched carbon nanotube," said Bandaru. "This discovery represents a new way of thinking about nano-electronic devices, and I think people interested in creating functionality at the nanoscale will be inspired to explore the ramifications of these Y-junction elements in greater detail."

The stunning increase in the speed and power efficiency of electronics over the past two decades was primarily due to the steady shrinkage in size of conventional transistors. Chip makers have reduced the minimum feature size of transistors to about 100 nanometers, and that dimension is expected to shrink by the end of this decade. However, industry experts predict that fundamental technological and financial limits will prevent the makers of conventional MOS transistors to reduce their size much further. The Y-shaped nanotubes discussed in the Nature Materials paper are only a few tens of nanometers thick and can be made as thin as a few nanometers.

"The small size and dramatic switching behavior of these nanotubes makes them candidates for a new class of transistor," said Bandaru.

Recently, I posted on how nanotubes can be used in conjunction with lasers to destroy cancer cells while not damaging healthy cells.

So, what is it that makes these nanotubes so special?

It's all about carbon.

For those who watched Star Trek (the original series, or even The Next Generation), likely you recall much discussion of "life as we know it" meaning "carbon-based life forms".

What exactly does that mean?

The fundamental chemistry behind life on Earth is based upon carbon.

There is an entire branch of Chemistry, called Organic Chemistry, that is devoted to molecules and reactions that involve carbon. This does not mean that all molecules that have carbon as a component are related to life, to the contrary, many if not most carbon-containing molecules are toxic or carcinogenic to most life.

However, almost all reactions related to life involve carbon as well.

Carbon is special because of its atomic structure.

Even though there are many other familiar names in the same column of the periodic table of the elements as carbon, such as silicon (the key material used to make the computer you are using to read this!), germanium (becoming more important in making high speed microprocessors), tin, and lead that all have similar chemical properties, none of these elements, nor any others, make the long chain molecules like carbon. There are some molecules based upon carbon that are as long as a millimeter!

Carbon also makes very strong bonds with itself. The hardest material known is diamond, which is a crystalline form of carbon. Strangely enough, one of the softer materials known, graphite (used in pencil lead, for those who still use pencils), is also made of carbon.

Nanotubes are made of carbon arranged in a structure that, naturally given the name, is a tube of carbon atoms. It is the strength of the carbon-carbon bond along with the long chaining that makes these molecules so special. A nanotube can be as long as a millimeter (perhaps even longer once we develop a method to fabricate them), and is very strong because of the carbon-carbon bonds.

Also, because of how carbon can make bonds with many other elements, the chemical and electrical characteristics of the nanotubes can be manipulated (within limits) to allow them to react with other chemicals in certain ways, or to behave under the influence of electric fields in certain ways.

In other words, carbon is unique in its chemical and electrical properties, and the molecular structures of nanotubes and buckyballs (more on that structure later) have many, many potential technological uses because the molecules can be manipulated more so than most other molecules known.

So, expect to see more news releases of how nanotubes and buckyballs are being applied to address different problems. This is the next technological revolution, and it may well have larger effects than even the microelectronic revolution of the last 15 years.

More on this topic later, if demand merits (in other words, if I get no comments or emails about this post, I won't follow up, if I get at least some interest, I'll spend the time and effort to write more... What, do you think it is easy to write about this stuff in non-scientific jargon???).

Technorati Tags: science, science & technology, science and technology, technology

Lasers - the light is still fantastic

In an interesting case of similar advances being made almost simultaneously in two different places:

Quantum Cascade Lasers Key To Handheld Gas And Liquid Sensors
---
Tiny Infrared Laser Holds Promise As Weapon Against Terror

A "quantum cascade laser" sounds like some kind of technobabble from Star Trek, but it is the real deal. However, unlike what we see on Star Trek or other television shows, sensors that can detect and identify an arbitrarily wide range of substances do not exist. Much of the development of chemistry in the early days even up until recently has been focused on the identification of unknown substances and ultimately, their molecular structure.

The parallel development discussed in the two articles linked above is in the area of lasers. Again, contrary to popular perception, a laser cannot be changed to any color you like, and the color, or wavelength, of the light coming out of the laser is important when the light is used in a detection system, because certain wavelengths are needed to detect certain chemicals. There are some lasers, such as dye lasers, that can be tuned to different wavelengths within a limited range, but these are large systems that are very awkward to deal with, including coping with toxic and carcinogenic materials that usually have to be pumped in a recirculating system so the dye does not overheat and degrade more quickly, and after all the effort involved the power of the resulting laser beam is very low.

A tunable laser that is small, portable, and powerful will be very important in developing sensors for many different materials, as is discussed in the articles above.

In another development involving lasers, this time in the field of biology, carbon nanotubes, a hot topic in solid state science for well over a decade, apparently can be modified to stick to cancer cells, creating a way for lasers to be used to literally burn the cancer out without affecting the normal cells surrounding the cancer:

Nanotube-Laser Combo Selectively Targets Cancer Cells, Study Shows

This is possible using a technique similar to the one used by the anti-cancer "smart bomb" recently announced, by adding certain chemical structures to the outsides of the molecule you want to attach to the cancer cell, like puzzle pieces those structures lock onto the corresponding structures that exist on the cancer cells but not healthy cells. The recent spate of developments in this field show the huge progress that has been made in chemical synthesis in the past few years.

In the chemical and biological engineering fields we may be benefiting from a similar acceleration to that seen over the last three decades in electronics. Each advance enables two or more other developments, which then provide the foundation for others, increasing the rate of technological progress at an almost exponential rate.

Technorati Tags: science, science & technology, technology

Good news from the health/anti-terrorism front

From MSNBC.com:

Monkeypox shows longevity of smallpox shots
Vaccinated people exposed to prairie dog virus didn't have symptoms

Reuters
Updated: 12:03 p.m. ET Aug. 8, 2005

WASHINGTON - A 2003 outbreak of monkeypox in the United States has helped prove that smallpox vaccinations can protect for decades, U.S. researchers said Monday.

The study could help officials trying to come up with a plan for mass vaccination against the often deadly smallpox virus and its relatives, should such a virus ever be used in a biological attack.

The researchers found three people who were evidently infected by the monkeypox virus, spread mostly by pet prairie dogs in the Midwest, who never had any symptoms.

The three had last been vaccinated against smallpox before the jabs were discontinued. One was vaccinated 13 years ago, another 29 years ago and the third 48 years ago.

"These individuals were unaware that they had been infected because they were spared any recognizable disease symptoms," Mark Kenneth Slifka of Oregon Health & Sciences University and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature Medicine.

"Together, this shows that the U.S. monkeypox outbreak was larger than previously realized and, more importantly, shows that cross-protective antiviral immunity against West African monkeypox can potentially be maintained for decades after smallpox vaccination."

Smallpox was eradicated in 1979 after a global vaccination program. But experts fear the virus or a related virus could be used as a biological weapon.

About half the U.S. adult population has been vaccinated as part of routine efforts that stopped in 1972 for civilians and 1990 for the military. Studies have shown that immunity lasts as long as 75 years.

Now work is underway to stockpile doses of vaccine in case of an attack, while tests are also underway to see if perhaps some people might be protected by their old vaccinations.

But no one has been able to do a real test of how well the vaccine protects -- until the monkeypox outbreak, traced to pet rodents imported from West Africa, where the close relative of smallpox is well entrenched and still common.

Not only does this provide data to allow for the prediction of the effects of a smallpox attack, but it also shows the longevity of the smallpox vaccine.

This is good news.

Technorati Tags: science and technology, science, science & technology, technology

Mathematics and non-conventional wars

From The Economist magazine, note especially the final paragraph:

Rules of engagement
Jul 21st 2005 From The Economist print edition

Scientists find surprising regularities in war and terrorism

ON JULY 19th, IraqBodyCount, a group of academics who are attempting to monitor the casualties of the conflict in that country, published a report suggesting that almost 25,000 civilians have been killed in it so far. In other words, 34 a day. But that is an average. On some days the total is lower, and on some higher—occasionally much higher.

It is this variation around the mean that interests Neil Johnson of the University of Oxford and Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College, London. They think it is possible to trace and model the development of wars from the patterns of casualties they throw up. In particular, by analysing IraqBodyCount's data and comparing them with equivalent numbers from the conflict in Colombia, they have concluded that, from very different beginnings, these conflicts are evolving into something rather similar to one another.

The groundwork for this sort of study was laid by Lewis Fry Richardson, a British physicist, with a paper on the mathematics of war that was published in 1948. Using data from conflicts that took place between 1820 and 1945, Fry Richardson made a graph displaying the number of wars that had death tolls in various ranges. The outcome was startling: rather than varying wildly or chaotically, the probability of individual wars having particular numbers of casualties followed a mathematical relationship known as a power law.

Power-law relationships crop up in many fields of science and are often a characteristic of complex and highly interacting systems (which war certainly is). Earthquake frequencies and stockmarket fluctuations are both described by power laws, for example. Power laws also have properties that make them different from statistical distributions such as the normal curve (or bell curve, as it is familiarly known). Unlike a bell curve, a power-law distribution has only one tail and no peak. Small tremors occur frequently, but over a few decades enormously large earthquakes will also occur with reasonable frequency. As will deadly wars and attacks.

In May, Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young, of the University of New Mexico, modified Fry Richardson's method to look at terrorist attacks. Instead of total casualties in a conflict, they plotted the deaths from individual incidents. Again, they got a power law. Actually, they got two. Power-law relationships are characterised by a number called an index. For each ten-fold increase in the death toll, the probability of such an event occurring decreases by a factor of ten raised to the power of this index, which is how the distributions get their name. Terrorist attacks within G7 countries could be distinguished from those inside non-G7 countries by their different indices. G7 countries were more likely to suffer large attacks. Indeed, in an article published earlier this year by Britain's Institute of Physics, Mr Clauset and Mr Maxwell said that “if we assume that the scaling relationship and the frequency of events do not change in the future, we can expect to see another attack at least as severe as September 11th within the next seven years.”

Dr Johnson and Dr Spagat took the method a couple of steps further. They extended Mr Clauset's and Mr Maxwell's idea of looking at the sizes of individual incidents within a campaign to other sorts of conflict, and also looked at how those conflicts have changed over time. As they report in a paper published recently in arXiv, an online archive, they found, yet again, that the data follow power laws. And for both of the wars they studied, the indices of those power laws have been approaching the value Mr Clauset and Mr Maxwell found for non-G7 terrorism, though from different directions. In other words, for the war in Iraq, the data indicate a transition from an index characteristic of more lethal, conventional war between armies to one closer to terrorism. No real surprise there, perhaps, though it is interesting to see perceptions on the ground reflected in the maths. For the Colombian conflict, though, the data show the opposite, a transition from a war characterised by smaller, less cohesive forces to a more unified rebel front—something that ought to worry Colombia's government.

Dr Johnson and Dr Spagat put forward as an explanation a mathematical model they have developed. It consists of a group of self-contained “attack units”, each of a particular strength. Such units can join together or fragment into smaller pieces. Over time, an equilibrium of joining and breaking is reached, but where that equilibrium lies depends on the strength of any central organisation. The model explains the power-law behaviour seen in both conventional wars and terrorist attacks. Different rates of fragmentation lead to different indices—conventional war is fought with robust armies that are unlikely to fragment, while terrorists are more likely to have shifting alliances.

Dr Spagat points out that, if their model is correct, it makes casualty data useful in a situation where intelligence about the enemy is hard to come by—as seems to be the case in Iraq at the moment. For instance, it should be possible to distinguish an insurgency with a rigid command structure from a group of smaller, randomly linked units. Learning about the distribution of earthquakes may not prevent the Big One, but for war and terrorism, power-law statistics may teach governments something about how to defeat the enemy, and make war less deadly.

Another piece in the ID puzzle

From Scientific American.com:

DNA Sequencing Speeds Up

Some of the implications of fast DNA sequencing were explored in the movie Gattica.

Interesting.

Technorati Tags: science, technology

A significant development in both medicine and nanotechnology

Because of the irresistible tendency I have towards making my political opinion known, I haven't been posting much on science and technology lately. That doesn't mean there hasn't been anything going on of interest, it just means I have only so many hours in a day, and I cannot write here about what I do at work, which can be really cool.

Here is something that caught my eye this past weekend. From Forbes.com, which gave one of the better explanations of this development:

Anti-Cancer 'Smart Bomb' Deals Killer Blow
-- Robert Preidt

WEDNESDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers say they've developed an anticancer "smart bomb" that delivers a lethal dose of drugs directly to tumors.

This tiny agent, called a "nanocell," enables precision targeting of the tumor while leaving adjacent healthy tissue unharmed, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

In research with mice, the nanocell proved safe and effective, prolonging survival in animals with melanoma and lung cancer, according to a study in the July 28 issue of Nature.

"We brought together three elements: cancer biology, pharmacology and engineering," research team leader Ram Sasisekharan, a professor in MIT's biological engineering division, said in a prepared statement.

The researchers described the nanocell as a balloon within a balloon that resembles an actual cell. The outer membrane of the nanocell is loaded with an anti-angiogenic drug designed to choke off the tumor's blood supply. The inner membrane of the nanocell is loaded with chemotherapy drugs.

A "stealth" surface chemistry on the nanocell enables it to avoid attracting the attention of the immune system. While the nanocells are small enough (200 nanometers) to pass through tumor blood vessels, they're too large to pass through the pores of healthy, normal vessels.

Once inside the tumor, the nanocell's outer membrane disintegrates, releasing the anti-angiogenic drug and causing the collapse of the blood vessels feeding the tumor. The collapsed blood vessels trap the nanocell inside the tumor. The nanocell then slowly releases its cache of chemotherapy drugs.

While interesting in itself because of the technical development (a direct use of nanotechnology, I haven't had time to finish reading the Nature article yet, I'm very interested in how they fabricate this structure), how it is being reported is also of note.

From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology news office web site:

"We brought together three elements: cancer biology, pharmacology and engineering," said Ram Sasisekharan, a professor in MIT's Biological Engineering Division and leader of the research team.

"The fundamental challenges in cancer chemotherapy are its toxicity to healthy cells and drug resistance by cancer cells," Sasisekharan said. "So cancer researchers were excited about anti-angiogenesis," the theory that cutting off the blood supply can starve tumors to death. That strategy can backfire, however, because it also starves tumor cells of oxygen, prompting them to create new blood vessels and instigate metastasis and other self-survival activities.

The next obvious solution would be combining chemotherapy and anti-angiogenesis-dropping the bombs while cutting the supply lines. But combination therapy confronted an inherent engineering problem. "You can't deliver chemotherapy to tumors if you have destroyed the vessels that take it there," Sasisekharan said. Also, the two drugs behave differently and are delivered on different schedules: anti-angiogenics over a prolonged period and chemotherapy in cycles.

"We designed the nanocell keeping these practical problems in mind," he said. Using ready-made drugs and materials, "we created a balloon within a balloon, resembling an actual cell," explains Shiladitya Sengupta, a postdoctoral associate in Sasisekharan's laboratory.

In addition to Sasisekharan and Sengupta, the co-authors are David Eavarone, Ishan Capila and Ganlin Zhao of MIT's Biological Engineering Division; Nicki Watson of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research; and Tanyel Kiziltepe of MIT's Department of Chemistry.

Note the use of a military metaphor, "dropping the bombs while cutting the supply lines," beyond the simple "smart bomb" analogy from the headline used by Forbes.com.

From the Yahoo! India News article on this topic, the headline is telling: Indian scientist designs nanocell to kill cancer

Technically, it should read "Indian scientist leads team that designs nanocell to kill cancer".

All reporting on the same technology development, all with different slants.

Illustrative of more than the nanocell itself, no?

Technorati Tags: science, technology

An odd feeling

While at work researching patents possibly related to a new idea I have that just might be patentable, I ran across a patent of mine that I had forgotten.

I was tracking down the patents referred to a in recently issued patent that was tangentially related to my new idea; unfortunately I have to be that thorough about these things. So, I looked at the full text and diagrams of the referred patents, making sure that my new idea wasn't already covered. There was one patent that stood out in a way that I couldn't quite place, so I payed particlar attention to it.

I didn't recognize it from the title or the abstract, but when the first diagram appeared on the web browser I went back to look at the inventors.

There was my name as first inventor, no less.

Then I couldn't resist the vanity search, and I discovered the company I worked for 13 years ago had been busy little bees after I had left and had obtained four patents in Japan that I had no idea existed (completely legitimate according to my contract).

I also had several patents issued by the European Union and recognized by the WTO from my current employer that I was also unaware of until today.

This all prompted some rather odd and uneasy feelings, knowing there are things out there with my name attached as "inventor" that I did not know existed.

Not completely coincidentally, there is a lot of uneasiness about the current system of patenting inventions in the United States.

Technorati Tags: personal, science, technology

Coudda been a contendah...

...but never really was. For many reasons, OS/2 from IBM never made a large dent in the operating system market. Many of the features pioneered in OS/2 are now regarded as essential.

Now, it's dead.

Interesting how the best product isn't the one that wins in the marketplace surprisingly often.

Technorati Tags: computers, technology

Life After Death

I don't believe in heaven or hell. I think when you die that's it-the end. But at the same time we all achieve a certain amount of immortality. We are remembered for some time after our deaths for good deeds and bad. How long depends on how good or bad they were. Some have a place in history and their names are remembered for generations. There are some, that although their names were never very well known, did something that had a profound impact on how humans live. One such man died recently, Jack Kilby, the inventor of the integrated circuit.

For decades after Jack St. Clair Kilby got the revolutionary idea that has enhanced daily life for almost everybody on Earth, people used to tell the inventor of the microchip that he deserved a Nobel Prize. He always scoffed at the notion. "Those big prizes are for the advancement of understanding," Kilby would explain in his slow, plainspoken Kansas way. "They are for scientists, who are motivated by pure knowledge. But I'm an engineer. I'm motivated by a need to solve problems, to make something work. For guys like me, the prize is seeing a successful solution."

As it happened, Jack Kilby did eventually win the Nobel Prize -- although the Royal Swedish Academy didn't award it until more than 40 years after his 1958 breakthrough and after he had received almost every other honor and award an engineer can receive.

The man who was responsible for so much of the modern world remained incredibly humble to the end.

Kilby expressed amazement at the vast range of applications -- calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, cell phones, space travel and so forth -- that have developed around the tiny circuit-on-a-chip that he devised when he was the most junior engineer at Texas Instruments.

"It's astonishing what human ingenuity and creativity can do," he said. "My part was pretty small, actually." Whenever people would mention that Kilby was responsible for the entire modern digital world, he liked to tell the story of the beaver and the rabbit sitting in the woods near Hoover Dam. "Did you build that one?" the rabbit asked. "No, but it was based on an idea of mine," the beaver replied.

Already the technology that will replace Kilby's silicon based microchip is being developed but his invention will remain the foundation of the digital world. Now that's immortality.

E-Tax

In his "Random Access" column, Washington Post reporter reports on a 'Net tax proposal that's floating around Congress:

Don't rush out and start dumping fiber-optic cable in the nearest harbor, mind you. A new tax to subsidize rural high-speed Internet access is still at the discussion phase in Washington. According to early news reports, Internet service providers would be responsible for collecting such a tax, which means that it probably would show up in your monthly Internet service bill.

It would be collected through in the same manner as the Universal Service Fund, which is used to extend phone service to rural areas.

It sounds like a worthy measure, but I'm not sure it's the best way to bring broadband to the boonies, especially considering how fast technology changes. What happens if broadband is brought to rural areas ... just in time for the technology used to be rendered out-of-date?

Apple joins the "Intel Inside" brigade

I've known about this for several months, but I was constrained in writing about it because my information was from "inside", and I do NOT want to muck with the FTC or the SEC, nor lose my job over my weblog:

Apple to switch to Intel's PC chips
New chips will allow PC maker to lower prices
By Jonathan Burton, MarketWatch
Last Update: 1:44 PM ET June 6, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Apple Computer Inc. said Monday that it will begin using microprocessor chips made by Intel Corp. in its signature Macintosh computers beginning next year, ending a longstanding relationship with International Business Machines Corp.

Apple made the announcement as Chief Executive Steve Jobs delivered the keynote speech at the company's annual conference for software developers in San Francisco.

"Our goal is to provide our customers with the best personal computers in the world, and looking ahead Intel has the strongest processor road map by far," Jobs said in a statement released at the start of his talk.

The chip transition is a stunning about-face for Apple, which has fought a long, mostly uphill battle against competing computer products that run on Intel chips and rival software from Microsoft Corp.

I strongly disagree with the statement by Steve Jobs that "Intel has the strongest processor road map by far," however I am sure I am biased.

I feel that the PowerPC road map is the strongest when evaluated by power, temperature, and operations per second criteria, relatively closely followed by AMD, with Intel running a poor third.

However, Intel can deliver large volumes of chips for a low cost, because of their advantages of scale.

So, in the end, it comes down to cost, not quality, as it always does.

Even if my company wasn't directly affected by this change, I'm sorry to see Apple follow it, because I have always felt they stood for quality over price.

---

A footnote: I strongly suspect both Steve Jobs and Apple as a whole will end up regretting this decision, because although Apple was not a large customer to either IBM or Freescale Semiconductor for the PowerPC chips, they will be an even smaller customer for Intel, so Jobs' infamous tirades regarding delivery schedules and prices will have even less effect then they had in the past.

Image processing taken to the next level...

It may sound like utter hokem, but it is self-consistent and passes my scientific BS filter:

We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics. In its simplest form, the technique can be used to take photographs without a camera; we demonstrate this by capturing a photograph using a projector and a photo-resistor. If the photo-resistor is replaced by a camera, we can produce a 4D dataset that allows for relighting with 2D incident illumination. Using an array of cameras we can produce a 6D slice of the 8D reflectance field that allows for relighting with arbitrary light fields. Since an array of cameras can operate in parallel without interference, whereas an array of light sources cannot, dual photography is fundamentally a more efficient way to capture such a 6D dataset than a system based on multiple projectors and one camera. As an example, we show how dual photography can be used to capture and relight scenes.

You have to go to the site to see the images, but what they have done is truly fundamentally important.

What exactly have they done?

They have verified that using a reasonably well understood principle, they have been able to reconstruct a real image from point of view that they do not have any direct information from.

This sounds like nothing, but it is more important than it seems on the face of it.

We can relatively easily reconstruct an artificial scene from any angle, as was well proven by the Star Wars movie The Phantom Menace (not discounting the numerous movies preceding or following it that used digital imaging), but to reconstruct a real image/scene from a different viewpoint using data only from that original image has not been done before.

Trivial? Not really.

Broader implications?

Difficult to list at the moment without sounding as if there were an indulgence in hyperbole, which is the risk for any advance in science or technology.

Often, however, the hyperbole is proved to be an underestimation of the actual potential and true consequences.

Technorati Tags: science, technology, science

Be careful using the Google Web Accelerator

From Boing Boing:

Google Accelerator is bad news for Web apps
Google Accelerator wreaks havoc on Web-apps by "clicking every link" on every control screen in order to cache it -- so it also ends up clicking on "Delete my account" and "Launch pre-emptive nuclear strike," etc.

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they've already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here's the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page -- including links like "delete this" or "cancel that." And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a "Are you sure you want to delete this?" Javascript confirmation behind that "delete" link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.

So be careful out there, you just might delete an account, or launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike...

Technorati Tags: technology

Hibernation inherent in all mammals?

There has been a development in biology I never expected. From MSNBC.com:

Scientists develop "hibernation on demand"
Technique could be used in hospitals to reduce fevers or buy time for organ transplants, researchers say

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior writer
Updated: 2:20 p.m. ET April 21, 2005

A new trick could one day put humans into hibernation without all the frigid antics of an Austin Powers movie or an Arthur C. Clarke story.

Using a natural chemical that humans and other animals produce in their bodies, scientists have for the first time induced hibernation in mammals, putting mice into a state similar to suspended animation for up to six hours and then bringing them back to normal life.

The breakthrough suggests that humans along with other mammals might harbor a mostly unused ability to hibernate on demand. Further research into the phenomenon could lead to medical advances, such as buying time for humans awaiting an organ transplant, scientists said.

"We are, in essence, temporarily converting mice from warm-blooded to cold-blooded creatures, which is exactly the same thing that happens naturally when mammals hibernate," said lead researcher Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

During the induced hibernation, cells virtually stopped working, reducing the rodents' need for oxygen.

"We think this may be a latent ability that all mammals have - potentially even humans - and we're just harnessing it and turning it on and off, inducing a state of hibernation on demand," Roth said.

The results are detailed in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

I'll think about the implications of this for a while and post on it later.

I truly hope this isn't something that ends up being found to be impractical in the end.

If we can truly induce hibernation, this could be huge.

Holy cow!!!

More later.

So W.C. Fields Was RIGHT

The late, great comedian W.C. Fields used to talk about how disgusting water was given what fishes did in it.

And now there are signs that he was right: drinking water may be hazardous to your health...or life (in a race). Science Blog reports:

Drinking water during a long-distance race may do serious harm rather than keep you safe from injury if you're drinking too much, according to a cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Runners or any long-distance athletes who drink too much water during a race could put themselves at jeopardy for developing hyponatremia, a condition marked by a loss in the body's sodium content that can result in physical symptoms such as lethargy, disorientation, seizures and even respiratory distress.

Wait a minute:"..lethargy, disorientation, seizures and even respiratory distress..." that sounds like a typical teenager being asked to do the dishes. And more:

In a perspectives article in the current issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Benjamin Levine, professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, said competitive runners are less likely to suffer from hyponatremia.

Dr. Benjamin Levine, professor of cardiology at UT Southwestern, writes in a perspective article for The New England Journal of Medicine that excessive water consumption said that excessive water consumption during exercise may be dangerous.

"Those who are running to finish the race very fast don't have time to drink a lot of water along the way," Dr. Levine said. "Those who are not running the race competitively tend to stop at every water station and take a drink. Over the course of a long race, they can dilute themselves."

That's called "self-dilution" -- but we digress:

In addition popular sports drinks don't always include enough sodium to offset the body's loss of the mineral during exercise. The drinks often carry more water with smaller concentrations of salts than are normally found in the human body; therefore, they do not replace salts adequately, said Dr. Levine, medical director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine, a collaboration between UT Southwestern and Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas.

How about this solution? Try bourbon instead. More:

The NEJM perspectives article accompanies a study in the same journal by researchers at Children's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. The study evaluates the blood concentration of sodium in runners both before and after a long race and examines their risk factors for developing hyponatremia. It recommends individualized fluid-replacement consumption by all competing athletes.

"Researchers of the study found a surprisingly large number of runners had actually gained weight during the race and their sodium concentrations were very low - some were dangerously low," Dr. Levine said. "The recommendations listed in the study that fluid-replacement schedules be individualized for all athletes competing in long-distance events should be taken seriously by all competitors."

People lose water and salts from their bodies at different rates during exercise, he said. Heat and humidity also play a role in the rate of this loss. Calculating fluid loss is as simple as weighing yourself before and after exercise and comparing that number to the amount of fluid you consumed throughout.

"All serious distance athletes should find out what their rate of fluid loss is and individualize their fluid intake prior to a distance event," Dr. Levine said. "It's also good to accept some mild dehydration during a long race. There are plenty of Web sites available now that show how to customize your fluid intake."

And porn sites that help some people customize their fluid..(we won't go there..)

He also added that taking along salty snacks to eat during the race is a good way of combating hyponatremia. Generally, athletes of all types are instructed prior to activities that water consumption is necessary to prevent illness from heat and to maintain performance levels.

And now you know the rest of the story.....

There's software to do almost everything

I find this somehow oddly amusing:

Press Release Creator

Our brand new software will help you create a press release, It's a great tool whether you know how to write one or not. Enter the information prompted for and out comes a press release at the click of a mouse.

I'm not exactly sure why I find humor in it, other than now not only are reporters not writing their stories (instead repeating press releases), but HUMANS are no longer writing the stories.

I have an odd sense of humor sometimes...

A key patent expires

From The Economist comes this news:

What the dominance of Microsoft Windows is to personal computers, the dominance of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is to biotechnology. PCR enables genetic material to be amplified in quantity both quickly and reliably. The procedure is used in all aspects of the life sciences, from paternity tests and cloning to decoding the genome and detecting disease. And it has transferred large numbers of dollars from the pockets of its users to those of its patent holder, F. Hoffmann-La Roche. But on March 28th, the gravy train began to dry up. The original patents on the technology expired in America (they expire in March 2006 in Europe). This means that the core PCR technique is now in the public domain.

For years, the high cost of PCR was the source of grumbles by businesses and researchers. Yet it became the standard method for genetic diagnostics and research, and alternatives never caught on. Now that the basic technique is free to use, many people expect the price of the equipment and enzymes involved to decline. The expiration of the PCR patent, in other words, marks the end of an era, and will have terrific consequences, according to Roger Brent, the head of the Molecular Sciences Institute, a non-profit research laboratory in Berkeley, California. New research areas, such as discovering drugs for tropical diseases, will now be open to PCR. In the past such work was too costly.

Interesting...

I don't know how much the licensing fees for using PCR techniques were, nor how many additional patents are associated with improvements to the process (the additional patents are mentioned later in the linked article), so it is difficult to say how the technique moving into the public domain will affect the expense of its use.

However, given that with the advent of the Mac Mini it is possible to build a massively parallel supercomputer for less than the price of a mid-range motorcycle, the decrease in the cost of using PCR could lead to more profound implications relating to DNA analysis, genetic computing, and custom tailoring biological forms in general,

There is throwing good money after bad...

...and then there is cutting money off from a good investment

Can we really trust that this particular cut is wise, given both the previous success and the (relatively) low cost of seeing it through to conclusion?

In a cost-cutting move prompted by President Bush's moon-Mars initiative, NASA could summarily put an end to Voyager, the legendary 28-year mission that has sent a spacecraft farther from Earth than any object ever made by humans

The probable October shutdown of a program that currently costs $4.2 million a year has caused consternation among scientists who have shepherded the twin Voyager probes on flybys of four planets and an epic journey to the frontier of interstellar space

"There are no other plans to reach the edge of the solar system," said Stamatios Krimigis, a lead investigator for the project since before its launch in 1977. "Now we're getting all this new information, and here comes NASA saying, 'We want to pull the plug.'

NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division arose in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget by nearly one-third — from $75 million to $53 million

---

Dick Fisher, NASA's deputy director for the Earth-sun division, acknowledged that Voyager's looming demise is a direct result of the new budget. He said the agency based its proposed cuts on a "senior review" by outside experts who in 2003 gave Voyager a low priority among the division's 13 "extended" missions.

"If we use that set of goals, we would be looking at certain missions that would have to be terminated," Fisher said in a telephone interview. "We have to [decide] whether to sweat the rest of the budget to pay for this."

An extended mission begins when a spacecraft has finished its original task but is still able to contribute new science. The best known one underway is that of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which are exploring the Martian desert a year after the end of their 90-day "design" mission.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, destined originally for a five-year journey to Jupiter and Saturn, have been extended repeatedly ever since. Most systems are functioning well, and both spacecraft are expected to provide usable data until their plutonium power sources are used up — probably in 2020.

For some perspective, reflect on the original argument for the missions

"I think it was the science adviser at the time, and the NASA administrator, who went to visit [then-President Richard] Nixon," Krimigis said, noting that Nixon was lukewarm on the mission. "They told him that the opportunity only arose once every 175 years — 'and Jefferson missed it.' " Nixon signed on.

Think about it for a while.

Cut off money for a mission that will not be repeated in our lifetime, nor the lifetime of any of our children currently alive, or pay the comparatively small amount to see it through to the end.

Are we willing to pay to "boldy go where no one has gone before"?

I hope we are.

Cross-posted to The Moderate Voice.

Houston, we just may have a problem...

Hmmm....

Hmmm....

This is scary

From ZDNet:

Automaker Lexus has denied that the Cabir wireless worm poses a risk to the Bluetooth-capable navigation systems featured in some of its vehicles.

We now have to worry about viruses and worms in our car computers because of the use of wireless interconnects?

I do NOT want my car freezing up because some joker decided to write a worm; it's bad enough with the PCs.

Many improvements have been introduced by using computer controlled fuel injection and timing resulting in increases of both fuel economy and power output. When it reaches the point to where cars are equipped with wireless interconnects (in this case, Bluetooth), that opens up vulnerabilities that I'm not entirely comfortable with in a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds and can travel at high speed.

This definitely falls in the "there is such a thing as too much technology" bin.

Old computers, like old hand tools, can have fond memories associated with them

A recent online article in the "Circuits" section of The New York Times describes how you can set up a Mac Mini to cohabitate with a PC using the same monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and how to network the two computers together.

This brings to mind a computer I had seemingly ages ago, set the wayback machine to the days of 1995, a Macintosh PowerPC 6100/66 with the PC card (ignore the horridly ugly monitor in the link, I had a nice, speaker-free Apple Monitor that had been on my old Macintosh LC system, which is still functional). The PC card had a full PC computer on it (a 80486DX2 with 32Mb of RAM, a LOT in those olden days), and used a "container file" on the Macintosh hard drive for permanent storage. The Mac could read and write to the PC hard drive container, and the two systems shared a CD-ROM drive quite well, thank you.

In other words, I had a desktop computer with two fully functional CPUs in it, one running Windows 3.1/DOS, and one running Mac OS 7 (eventually OS 8, and then OS 9, but upon installing OS 9 I lost access to the PC card because that support was dropped).

I still own that computer, and it's still fully functional. When I return to the US, I plan to reinstall Mac OS 8 on it so I can have my old 486 DOS PC access again. I played many games on that PC that will not work on modern systems (the game Privateer from Origin Systems was my favorite, but there were several iterations of Wing Commander and a few wargames I played on it as well) that I sorely miss revisiting upon occasion.

So, we're now repeating history, but this time, we have a big box (the desktop PC) and a small box (the Mac Mini) sharing a keyboard, mouse, and monitor but NOT a hard disk, whereas a decade ago we had a single mid-sized box sharing the keyboard, mouse, monitor, hard disk, CD-ROM drive (a disadvantage sometimes...), and in many cases, printers.

I had two fully functional computers for the price of about one and a quarter of the sum of two systems of comparable capability.

I think I may pick up a Mac Mini and a USB/monitor switch-box the next time I'm in the US so I can set up the dual system described in the "Circuits" article. I miss my old 6100/66. That was a GOOD system that did everything I wanted. It was the first system I used to get on the World Wide Web. It was so cool at the time to be able to look at web sites from Europe! Now the prosaic nature of the web (notice the lack of capitalization now...) has diminished that magic, at least for those who have no memory of the time before it was so easy.

Some trends that may affect the computer you can buy in 2012

For some perspective on the challenges of my job this page, which is part of a larger description of past trends and future evolution in microprocessor development, give a reasonably good description of the problems I am trying to overcome.

I recommend reading the entire article, which is part one of a series on "The Quest for More Processing Power".

What is interesting is that I didn't see really any note in the parts I skimmed regarding how in the next few years we will be undergoing a transition from where process technology (which is the way we actually make the microprocessors, using different processes to put films down and selectively remove them to make the transistors and the wires that connect them together) and the improvements in the process technology are paramount in the increase of capability of microprocessors to where the design of the microprocessor itself becomes the key to continued increase in processing power.

Most of the improvements in electronics (specifically processing and memory capacity) have been due to improvements in process technology. In my career, which started in 1991 when I was working on state of the art technology of the time, we have gone from the thinnest layer we make (which happens to be the heart of the transistor, and the part that I have consistently worked on) going from a thickness of roughly 9nm (a nanometer is 1E-9 meters, a meter is a wee bit over 3 feet long, and nano, or 1E-9 is 1/1,000,000,000, so a nanometer is 1/1,000,000,000 of 3 feet... atoms on average are about 0.5nm apart) to about 1.5nm. Atoms are roughly 0.5nm apart (not all are that distance apart, but it's close enough and it makes the math easier), so we have gone from the thinnest film being 18 atoms thick in 1991 for the absolute state-of-the-art, to about 3 (yes THREE) atoms thick for the current state-of-the-art microprocessors.

Think about it, 3 atoms. There's not much room left for this film, is there? Admittedly, there are some ways around it, notably changing the material used, but I've been working on that project for the last 5 years, and no one has the answer to which material to use yet.

Also, another key part of the transistor is the length of the gate. The gate is what is controls whether the transistor is "on" or "off", in other words, a "1" or a "0" in the binary signals used in MPUs (MicroProcessor Units). That gate length has gone down to where it is in the range of 100 atoms across.

Again, think about it, 100 atoms.

So, this change in primacy from process technology to design techniques for improvement in performance is not only expected but almost inevitable unless we come up with some breakthrough in either materials or fundamental structure of transistors.

I don't see this truly watershed transition really recognized widely.

As an FYI, the stuff I work on now will go into production around 2011 or 2012, which means I have a reasonable view of what will be available around 7 years out.

There are a lot of wide-ranging effects that will arise out of this transition. I may write on them later, but for now, to sleep, perchance to dream, but hopefully not and instead an all too brief visit with the bliss of an inactive brain.

How the Mac Mini has implications for biological computing

From the January 27th column by Robert X. Cringely:

Imagine a Mac Minicluster running Apple's xGrid software. Start with a 16-port fast Ethernet switch and stack 16 Mac Minis on top. That's a 720 gigaflop micro-supercomputer that costs less than $9,000, can fit on a bookshelf, and can be up and running in as little time as it takes to connect the network cables. High schools will be sequencing genes.

Holy cow!

For less than the cost of even a mid-range motorcycle, much less an average car, it is now possible to buy and build a supercomputer that has more computing power than the room-sized machines of just a decade ago.

Holy cow!!!

Take a moment to consider the last sentence of the quoted passage, "High schools will be sequencing genes."

Now, read this bit from Science News:

In the past few years, scientists have taken the first steps towards creating a host of cellular robots that are programmed to carry out tasks such as detecting and cleaning up environmental pollutants, tracking down cancer cells in a body, and manufacturing antibiotics or molecular-scale electronic components. These researchers have imported notions of electrical engineering—digital logic, memory, and oscillators—into the realm of biology. Their plan: to create cells with computer programs hardwired into the DNA.

"Eventually, the goal is to produce genetic 'applets', little programs you could download into a cell simply by sticking DNA into it, the way you download Java applets from the Internet," says Timothy Gardner, a bioengineer at Boston University.

The goal is not to produce a Pentium in a test tube. Cellular computers will probably never rival silicon chips in speed and reliability. "We don't use cells because they're a good medium for computation but because they can actually do stuff for us," says Adam Arkin, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Scientists intend to harness the multitude of cellular activities, which go beyond the capacity of silicon devices. Living cells can survive on the flanks of undersea volcanoes and in acidic mine drainage. They operate amazingly efficient factories for producing antibiotics, enzymes, and other useful chemicals, and they generate numerous copies of themselves. Cells can detect minute changes around them, and perhaps most crucially, interact with their environment.

By cutting and pasting pieces of genetic material, and most recently using artificial evolution as a design tool, engineers are starting to program microbes to carry out behaviors that nature never dreamed of. "We're basically hacking DNA instead of software," says Ron Weiss of Princeton University.

There is more, well worth reading.

Now that the geek cool factor is out, take a step back and think: The pieces are falling into place for an infrastructure to build custom genes, similar to how we can already easily make custom integrated circuits, and infrastructure that is relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to that required for integrated circuits. The DNA "circuits" have an even larger number of potential applications than what we have made of integrated circuits and electronics.

Now, think about this...

It is theoretically possible (remembering that in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they're not) to put custom tailored DNA into a self-replicating structure such as a bacterium or a virus.

A high school can now afford most of the equipment for DNA sequencing...

I think you can see how I'm both thrilled and concerned.

Is it really still "patching"...

...when there are THIRTEEN of them?

On 8 February 2005 the Microsoft Security Response Center is planning to release:

- 9 Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for these security updates is Critical. Some of these updates will require a restart.

- 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft SharePoint Services and Office. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Moderate. These updates may or may not require a restart.

- 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft .NET Framework. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Important. This update will require a restart.

- 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Office and Visual Studio. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for this security bulletin is Critical. These updates will require a restart.

- 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Windows, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger. The greatest aggregate, maximum severity rating for these security updates is Critical.

These updates will require a restart.

Yes, "only" ten of these patches are Windows, the rest are for other Microsoft applications and add-ons, but the question is still valid - a boat needing this many "patches" would have sunk by now!

Then there is this anecdote:

So about a year ago, the SO finally upgraded her Net connection to DSL, carefully installed the Yahoo! DSL software into her creaky Sony Vaio PC laptop and ran through all the checks and install verifications and appropriate nasty disclaimers.

And all seemed to go smoothly and reasonably enough considering it was a Windows PC and therefore nothing was really all that smooth or reasonable or elegant, but whatever. She just wanted to get online. Should be easy as 1-2-3, claimed the Yahoo! guide. Painless as tying your shoe, said the phone company.

She got online all right. The DSL worked great. For about four minutes.

Then, something happened. Something attacked. Something swarmed her computer the instant she tried to move around online and the computer slowed and bogged and cluttered and crashed, and multiple restarts and debuggings and what-the-hells only brought up only a flood of nightmarish pop-up windows and terrifying error messages and massive system slowdowns and all manner of inexplicable claims of infestation of this worm and that Trojan horse and did we want to buy McAfee AntiVirus protection for $39.95?

Four minutes. And she was already DOA.

A lot of the griping about Microsoft is really jealousy of the wealth that Bill Gates and many of his associates have gained. However, it is now reaching the point where Windows-based computers can become unusable by the average person so quickly after going to an always-on Internet connection that many of the criticisms are starting to gain validity beyond simple envy.

So why haven't more people voted with their wallets but instead seem to just accept the flawed software?

Fucking Windows...

I try to post some quotes from an article on MSNBC (of all places) using a supposedly compliant Windows application, and guess what, it completely fucks up both the apostraphes and the quotations marks.

I do this with my Mac OS X system, and none of these problems occur.

Fuck Windows...

Even in technology "tipping points"...

...which you would think had clear-cut decision points, there are a multitude of "what if" scenarios (read the comments).

Some quick thoughts on the so-called Information Age

From CNN.com:

Feds: Quecreek miner's map misfiled
Map could have prevented accident

Saturday, January 15, 2005 Posted: 11:02 AM EST (1602 GMT)

UPPER ST. CLAIR, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A map of an abandoned mine that might have prevented a flood that trapped nine miners underground for 77 hours had been tucked away in a coal company closet and forgotten, a government report shows.

The nine-man team of miners working in the Quecreek mine in July 2002 had an outdated map that didn't show the exact location of the adjacent Saxman mine, which was filled with millions of gallons of water.

The miners pierced the wall of the Saxman mine, quickly filling part of the Quecreek mine with water and trapping the miners. Crews were eventually able to pull them out one-by-one in a dramatic rescue that made international headlines.

I see this every day in my job; information already exists that would help avoid problems (or disasters), yet it is not readily available to those who need it. In some cases, the unavailibility is due to appropriate systems not being in place to allow the information to be distributed, in other cases the information is "lost" similar to the case described by CNN above regarding the miners.

This is the key problem of our so-called Information Age. Information is useless unless it is not only available to those who need it, but also those who need it must be aware of it for the information to actually be of any use. This need for awareness is usually forgotten in the efforts to streamline and improve the distribution of data, but I suspect that eventually it will be regarded as key.

Now, how do we fix the problem?

Photos from another world

Titan appears to have some kind of liquid present on the surface. This is very important, because it is hypothesized that it is much easier for life of any type, not just that we are familiar with, to form in the presence of liquids.

The image archive for the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and the moon Titan is here.

Here is the first color image from the surface:

A composite panorama made up of images taken during the descent can be found here.

For those who enjoy throwing rocks...

...even though they don't understand even the fundamentals of the science behind the opinions of those they are throwing rocks at, here's a chance for you to put your money where your mouth is.

As a working scientist, one of the many sources of fuel for my recent anger is people throwing around statistics and data on topics they are completely ignorant about. The possibility of climate change is one of those topics that I do know something about; now there is an opportunity for everyone to learn some things about it on their own.

NASA has released a climate model that can be run on a desktop computer (PC or Mac).

NOTE: NASA doesn't have an "agenda" on climate change, and if you are firmly convinced it does then go back to your echo chamber, play with your friends shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with you, and remain willfully ignorant.

The download of the climate model can be found at this site: The EdGCM Cooperative.

Play around with the model, see what happens when you change the composition of the atmosphere of the planet. Learn something by doing, by tweaking and experimentation and seeing how results change, the absolute best way to learn.

Yes, the model is based upon certain hypotheses that have yet to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. We've seen dramatic action taken in other areas where the reasonable doubt proved to be true, so, perhaps you should consider opening your mind to other possibilities.

Remember, it is the flexible trees that survive the worst storms, not the rigid ones that become strained beyond the breaking point.

You might just be surprised at what you can learn if you're willing to continually challenge what you think is absolute truth, because real truths can withstand challenge.

It is the falsehoods masquerading as truth that fear the light of scrutiny.