Dexter Johnson writes, “What Should We Call the (Nano)technology in Your Stain-resistant Pants?” … the competition for ownership of the term “nanotechnology” that seems to persist between the adherents to MNT, as exemplified by the Foresight Institute, and those who use the term to acknowledge developments in manipulating and exploiting structures that have at least… Continue reading Nanopants, redux
When I woke up this morning, it was nine degrees below zero, Celsius. It’s solidly overcast here, and what’s more, this time of year the sun doesn’t get much more than 20 degrees above the horizon — in the middle of an all-too-short day. My house has a footprint of about 200 square meters. At… Continue reading A Night in the Sun
At Bryan Caplan’s blog this morning there was an odd comment that stirred up a 40-year old memory: A single sentence in the Durants’ The Age of Napoleon makes me wonder whether I can trust a word they write on economic policy: The memory is that it was reading another part of the Durant’s Story… Continue reading Some Historical Perspective
Futurists make lots of predictions, and usually by the time they can be tested they’ve been long forgotten. That’s great when we get them wrong (which is a lot more often than we’d like!) but I take pleasure in claiming I got one right. In this post I wrote: So what’s the next paradigm shift?… Continue reading Prediction
The worlds smallest snowman. from nanowerk The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair. The snowman was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide,… Continue reading The worlds smallest snowman
Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a programmer. He was an amazingly productive programmer, producing thousands of working, debugged lines of code every day. Then he learned about DO-loops. One of the foundational concepts behind the idea of Singularity is the notion of self-improving AI. And one of the key notions behind… Continue reading Singularity and the codic cortex
Researchers show how proteins slide along DNA to carry out vital biological processes. For decades, scientists have known that proteins searching for genetic sequences are able to locate them at rates much faster than expected. They found that rather than moving around the entire three-dimensional space inside a cell, they moved in one-dimension, along DNA… Continue reading Researchers show how proteins slide along DNA to carry out vital biological processes
There’s an interesting debate between Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson on their respective blogs. Caplan writes: … Robin didn’t care about biological survival. He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body. He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to… Continue reading Cryonics and Philosophy of Mind
(Atomic Age, that is.) From the University of Chicago Library site: On December 2, 1942, scientists at the University of Chicago produced the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a nuclear pile constructed in a squash court beneath the West Stands of Stagg Field, the University’s athletic stadium. This experiment, crucial to the control… Continue reading It's 0067 AA
IEEE Spectrum: Radios With Micromachined Resonators. It’s likely that better mechanical components, and the cognitive-radio techniques they enable, will usher in the next wave of mobile telephony by giving our cellphones access to much more spectrum. These phones will operate in multiple bands, provide greater data throughput, and minimize if not eliminate the need for… Continue reading IEEE Spectrum: Radios With Micromachined Resonators
