Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube
Man, I so love to see technology advancing to exactly what I was envisioning for Communion of Dreams. And when I say “envision”, I mean that literally:
That’s from Word Lens, a company who came up with instant-translation software you can use on your smart phone. And it’s just brilliant.
That’s *exactly* the sort of tech I projected for CoD – there is a reference early on to the main character asking his AI “Expert” to load a program to allow him to understand Mandarin in real time, and to provide him with an augmented-reality text for responses that he could read in order to allow him to communicate with a young girl from China. Yeah, that is more advanced than what we see in the vid above, but not that much moreso.
Wow.
Jim Downey
Sometimes you just need to look up. This is one of those days for me. So here is some amazing slow-motion footage of a shuttle launch. It really gets going about the 2:30 mark.
Enjoy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech
Way back in the lost mists of time, someone, somewhere on Facebook decided that they would post something in recognition of friends and loved ones struggling with a disease. Someone else liked what they said, and so in solidarity, cross-posted the same item, perhaps tweaking it just a little. This process continued, and a meme was born. Here is the latest version of it:
Most people have 1000 wishes for Christmas; a cancer patient only has one, to get better. I know 97% of you won’t repost this to your status, but my friends will be the 3% that do. In honor of someone who has passed, is still fighting, or survived cancer.
OK, it could have just been a year ago that this particular meme started. I’ve only been on Facebook for about six months. But I have seen multiple variations of this thing sweep through my ‘friends’, each time with a different disease or cause substituted for “cancer”. My guess, however, in watching the social dynamic, is that this sort of thing has been going on forever.
Harmless? Just a bit of social bonding, people taking a moment to express a concern they have?
Probably. And perhaps it is only because I’m coming up on the anniversary of my father’s death that this latest item rubbed me the wrong way. I know I get sensitive about such things about this time of year.
But I don’t think it is harmless. I think it is a form of emotional blackmail: “Do this or you don’t *really* care about cancer, you heartless bastard.” And because people don’t want to come off as being a heartless bastard, they fall for it.
I’ve considered driving this point home by going through and posting every single variation on this meme I can think of, just to point out the absurdity of the practice. There’s cancer. Diabetes. Heart disease. Violence. Child abuse. Automotive safety. Terrorism. Et cetera, et cetera. I could spend the whole next month doing nothing but posting status updates which are variations on this theme.
Of course, all it would do is just alienate everyone who knows me. And that pretty much defeats the purpose for my signing up for Facebook to start with.
But that is exactly my point – why I don’t think these things are harmless. Because they prey upon the social lubrication through which the site functions, leeching away real emotion and connectivity. In some ways, this is an artificial lifeform, the online equivalent of a parasite.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, Politics, Privacy, Science, tech, Terrorism
…to yesterday’s post, in which I focused primarily on the civil liberties aspect of the latest TSA security procedures.
I am not competent to evaluate the technical or engineering safety of the equipment being used for full-body scanning. But this guy is:
I am a biochemist working in the field of biophysics. Specifically, the lab I work in (as well as many others) has spent the better part of the last decade working on the molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer. The result of that work is that we now better understand that people who have a deficient BRCA2 gene are hypersensitive to DNA damage, which can be caused by a number of factors including: UV exposure, oxidative stress, improper chromosomal replication and segregation, and radiation exposure.
That’s the into to a post of his about the safety of one type of the new scanners. You should read the whole thing – it is well written for an intelligent lay person, though some of the technical stuff might be beyond your ken. It isn’t hyperbolic, but it is *very* sobering. Here’s the key paragraph which leapt out at me:
Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant’s testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!
This isn’t the only serious assessment of this technology which has been critical – in fact, he is largely writing in reaction to the government’s effort to discredit a letter of concern about the technology from a group of scientists and doctors at the University of California at San Francisco. I think the procedures should be changed based purely on civil liberties concerns, as I have written previously. But when you add in the technical concerns, I think the need to stop the use of these procedures becomes even more apparent.
Jim Downey
Via BB – which prompted me to take the time and go read the whole post, though I had seen references to it elsewhere previously.
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech
One of the main technological features of the setting of Communion of Dreams is the Advanced Survey Array – an artificial satellite in orbit around Titan, which is searching for likely planets to colonize in nearby star systems – planets which would be able to sustain Terran life. When I started writing CoD, finding such planets was still very much beyond our current tech – exoplanets of any sort were still just being inferred from other data.
But we’ve come a long way in the last decade. From Phil Plait’s latest blog post on Exoplanets:
Direct imaging of exoplanets is perhaps the newest field in all of astronomy. Ten years ago it didn’t exist, and was something of a dream. Now we have images of seven tiny dots, seven blips of light indicating the presence of mighty planets.
And with the advent of spectroscopy, we’ll learn even more: how hot they are, and what they have in their atmospheres. Eventually, with new technology, new telescopes on space, we’ll be able to split their light ever finer, and who knows? Maybe, one day not too long from now, we’ll see the tell-tale sign of molecular oxygen… the only way we know of to have molecular oxygen in an atmosphere over long periods of time is through biological activity. If we ever see it… that, my friends, will be quite a day indeed.
As I have noted previously, this is one of the dangers in writing near-term SF: that actual technological developments can outstrip what the writer envisions all too easily. We’re still not to the tech of my novel, but we’re further along than I would have guessed. Good thing that the book will soon be in print . . .
Jim Downey
Gotta love the geeky stuff. What happens when you drop water onto a superhydrophobic carbon nanotube? This:
The header reference starts about 2:25.
I love this sort of stuff. And it seems really timely to come across it when I am wrapping up work on the minor revisions of Communion of Dreams, since in there I have descriptions of superfluid materials which behave in non-intuitive ways. Kinda fun!
Jim Downey
OK, as you might guess from my BBTI project, I am a sucker for “homebrew science”. I love people who are willing to spend some time and a little money to sort out the various issues and make use of current tech in order to do their own type of research, just for shits and giggles.
This is one such project: using a weather balloon, a digital video camera, and an iPhone, combined with a bit of styrofoam and ingenuity, these guys sent a camera into the edge of space – to some 100,000 feet. And then they recovered the camera, which landed just 30 miles from their launch point, thanks to the GPS tracking of the iPhone.
Now, how cool is that?
My hat’s off to you, Luke Geissbuhler & crew.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Blade Runner, movies, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech
I’ll often re-watch a favorite movie. But seldom will I do so in the span of a couple of days.
However, this weekend I watched something which was so visually compelling, and which had me pondering a number of different issues, that I held onto the NetFlix envelop for an extra day so that I could watch the movie again after I had time to digest the first viewing of it. That movie is Renaissance.
OK, there are a lot of things to like about this movie. But first, let me say a couple of things about its weaknesses. The plot has minor problems. The dialog is uneven in places. Some of the characters are cartoonish.
Yet overall the movie is a success. As noted, most of the visuals are incredibly compelling – which is quite a nice accomplishment in using black & white (and grey tone) animation. When I re-watched the movie last night, I found myself pausing it just to take in some scenes more completely, and a bunch of the movie I watched at half-speed, just so I could appreciate how the artists did what they did.
I was also intrigued to see the vision of the near-term future the movie is based on. It’s set in 2054, just two years later than my novel Communion of Dreams is set. And a lot of the tech they foresee is the same sort of thing I do, at least that’s implied by what shows up on the screen. I found myself wanting to know a *lot* more about that world and how things worked – a good sign, and part of the reason I wanted to think about the movie for a couple of days before watching it again.
Another good thing about Renaissance are the references it makes to other highly regarded science fiction stories, as well as some of the less well-known ‘arthouse’ movies. But it doesn’t beat you over the head with those, or drop them in gratuitously – they serve a purpose, and are part of the overall look and story of the movie.
If you like good science fiction, if you like film noir, if you like animation not intended for children, then track down and watch Renaissance.
Jim Downey
What’s big, round, and cost a gazillion dollars – all in order to just smash things? Why, the 
Large Hadron Collider, of course.
At least that might be the impression you take away from the first part of today’s Sixty Symbols video.
Oh, there’s actually a lot of good science and decent imagery in the video, as well. But it’s an odd mix of being too simplistic and then on the other hand assuming that you understand a fair amount of physics. The explanations are good, if a little basic – but then there are repeated use of images showing the energy traces from collisions (in both two and three dimensions) without much in the way of explanations of what it is you are seeing. Someone who doesn’t understand those might easily come to a conclusion that they’re some kind of explosion (which they are, but not in the sense most people think) and think that the whole thing is dangerous (which it is, but only if the multiple safety features fail). That there have been some problems with this massive machine which resulted in a segment of superconducting magnets breaking loose and dumping a ton of liquid helium into the tunnel doesn’t help matters. These are the sorts of things which may well have contributed to the nonsensical fears in the popular press about the LHC creating a black hole and destroying the Earth.
Anyway, it’s a good video, if you ignore some of these problems. I did learn a couple of things from it (I didn’t realize that they were getting their particles accelerated to within 10 meters-per-second of the speed of light, for example). And I like that they did address how basic scientific research leads to real world applications which more than pay for themselves in the aggregate, though that almost seemed like an afterthought at the end of the video. So if you get a chance, check it out.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 