Jun 30 2009

They’ll need SOMEONE to take care of them

Category: society,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:05 am

Japan is dying by inches. It is simply not reproducing itself into the next generation. And, because it is one of the most closed societies on Earth to immigration, it is going to have a very hard time getting anyone to take care of its aging population.  For that reason, robotics research of all kinds is hugely funded — they hope that robots will be cooking, cleaning, even providing basic medical care — as well as research into ways to increase the mobility of the elderly.

Toyota Motor Corp. says it has developed a way of steering a wheelchair by just detecting brain waves, without the person having to move a muscle or shout a command.

Toyota’s system, developed in a collaboration with researchers in Japan, is among the fastest in the world in analyzing brain waves, it said in a release Monday.

Past systems required several seconds to read brain waves, but the new technology requires only 125 milliseconds _ or 125 thousandths of a second.

The person in the wheelchair wears a cap that can read brain signals, which are relayed to a brain scan electroencephalograph, or EEG, on the electrically powered wheelchair, and then analyzed in a computer program.

Research into mobility is part of Toyota’s larger strategy to go beyond automobiles in helping people get around in new ways.

We all stand to benefit from Japan’s probably hopeless attempt to plan for its, uh, permanent retirement.  Rather than taking the European approach of allowing high levels of immigration to provide the workforce that isn’t being born natively, Japan is going to bequeath some amazing new technologies, which are likely to have applications far beyond replacing the missing younger generation in eldercare.

If Europe was spending its money this way, we might have seen a “robotics and remote control” race between Europe and Japan.  Sadly, Europe is so mired in its ways that it is dying another way, and, in the dying, is bequeathing nothing but huge problems to the world.

Does anyone think a US car company has been doing basic research of this nature?  Nah…  too busy trying to figure out how to meet ridiculous CAFE standards for fuel economy, while paying cushy retirement packages to retirees with probable life spans of 30+ years after retirement.  The only robots in the US auto industry (outside the factories that used to be busy making cars) are the ones marching to the tune of the federal bureaucrats who have taken over.

Jun 16 2009

Machines watching with gimlet eyes

Category: humor,society,technology — harmonicminer @ 8:49 am

Security officials are exploring the use of computer processed cameras to spot suspicious behavior and refer it to humans for verification. They are Asking a Machine to Spot Threats Human Eyes Miss

Using a mock-up of an Airbus, the researchers tested camera systems that would identify threats inside passenger planes. Some of the cameras on board, Ferryman said, focused on a passenger’s face and upper torso, looking for telltale signs that someone may be up to no good _ heavy sweating, for instance.

Hmmm… I see lots of heavy sweating every time I give a final exam. I knew some of those guys were up to no good.  Of course, some of them may think I’m a terrorist.

As time goes on, I think we’re heading for the world predicted by David Brin in Earth.  Pretty much everybody will soon be carrying around video cameras on their phones, pdas and handheld video games, and pretty much every business, home, street light and power pole will have a video camera connected to a computer somewhere that is deciding whether to alert humans to review some footage (a term which itself will continue to exist for some time, but soon no one will remember where it came from).

Stop light cameras are just the beginning.  Everyone will be watching everyone, all the time.

I think there will be a whole new line of “stealth clothing,” which will be something that reflects light in ways difficult for computers to process.  Lots of folks will start wearing fedoras scrunched down to obscure their faces, and bizarrely glittery and deceptive clothing.  Of course, we see that at the Oscars every year.  Look for lines of facial makeup that obscure video pickup…  think glitter on steroids, producing images that the human eye can process, but are hard for computers to identify.  It’ll give Victoria’s Secret a whole new meaning.

And we haven’t even talked about satellite surveillance yet.   It won’t be long before every country with a little excess change will have its own satellites, watching each other and everyone else.  Look for Google Earth to start showing current military resolutions of imagery (classified, but rumored to be able to read license plates), as miltary resolutions increase to the point of reading the labels on your clothing.

From Music to Watch Girls By

“The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by,
Eye to eye, they solemnly convene to make the scene.”

Your video processing software ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Privacy and anonymity are so….  20th century.

Mar 10 2009

I want one. Or two.

Category: military,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:30 am

Having been a roadie in a former life, and occasionally still being forced to function in that capacity, this looks like just the thing to help me manage those heavy flight cases for mixers, full size keyboards, etc.

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Feb 14 2009

At last, we can all own one!

Category: humor,technology — sardonicwhiner @ 10:17 am

I always wanted a Retro-Encabulator, but never thought I could afford one.

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Jan 01 2009

the Impossible dream?

Category: science,space,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:19 am

For 50 years we’ve been Waiting for ET to phone us.

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.

April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.

Other famous searchers for things that were never found:

   Albert Einstein and Unified Field Theory.

   Don Quixote and defeatable windmills

   Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

   Isaac Newton and a way to turn lead into gold

   AI researchers and actual machine intelligence

   Modern physics and cold fusion

You get the idea.  Some things just SOUND plausible, even likely.  The argument that “the universe is just so big that there has to be intelligent life out there” is like that.  It just instinctively sounds right.

That doesn’t make it right.

And even if they are there, the aliens are almost certainly far, far ahead of us, so far that we wouldn’t recognize one of their artifacts or communications methods if we saw it.  Or, they are so far behind us that they’re still working on inventing the bow and arrow, or controlling fire.  The odds of intelligent aliens in a detectable state of technological development anywhere near us are so small as to be laughable.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll all for funding more SETI, though I’m not acquiescent about more active approaches.  ET may not be nice.

But I don’t expect much to be found.

Dec 06 2008

Smart bugs: oh to be a fly on the wall

Category: technology — harmonicminer @ 10:51 am

Bug-Sized Spies: US Develops Tiny Flying Robots

If only we could be a fly on the wall when our enemies are plotting to attack us. Better yet, what if that fly could record voices, transmit video and even fire tiny weapons?

That kind of James Bond-style fantasy is actually on the drawing board. U.S. military engineers are trying to design flying robots disguised as insects that could one day spy on enemies and conduct dangerous missions without risking lives.

“The way we envision it is, there would be a bunch of these sent out in a swarm,” said Greg Parker, who helps lead the research project at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. “If we know there’s a possibility of bad guys in a certain building, how do we find out? We think this would fill that void.”

In essence, the research seeks to miniaturize the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle drones used in Iraq and Afghanistan for surveillance and reconnaissance.

The next generation of drones, called Micro Aerial Vehicles, or MAVs, could be as tiny as bumblebees and capable of flying undetected into buildings, where they could photograph, record, and even attack insurgents and terrorists.

Can I have one of these to send to faculty meetings, so I can just stay home and watch remotely? The best part: if I decide to speak from my position as fly on the wall, and as usual someone throws something at me, I can just smile and change the channel.

They’ll never take me alive….  er, my bug, that is.

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Oct 11 2008

Big Brother is taking over my TV: be afraid, be very afraid

Category: humor,Obama,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:05 am

Friday night I noticed that two of my favorite TV shows, Life and Numbers, were at the same time. So I decided to watch one, and record the other on a Dish Networks DVR. I live far out on the boonies… so we have a Dish Network satellite system for TV.

I went to the TV/DVR receiver where I was going to record Life, while watching Numbers. I turned it on. It was SUPPOSED to have already been preset to record Life, since I record all episodes, so it’s sort of a global thing in the receiver’s settings. And it was time, and should have been recording.

But it wasn’t tuned to channel 4 and recording. Instead, it was tuned to channel 73, and the show was “Obama’s Plan For America” (paid ad).

I was confused. I knew it was preset to record Life, whenever an episode came on. The DVR has been very reliable and stable. Still scratching my head, I changed the channel to channel 4, and was going to just manually record Life for now. And indeed, the DVR registered the key press, and changed to channel 4… except that it didn’t. It showed the TEXT display for channel 4, but still displayed Obama’s Plan For America. And then the text display switched back to channel 73. Obama was talking about universal healthcare. Maybe he really, really wanted me to hear.

Continue reading “Big Brother is taking over my TV: be afraid, be very afraid”

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Oct 02 2008

Space, the USA, the future, the shuttle, and Russia

Category: Congress,Russia,shuttle,space,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:13 am

You may have seen this very interesting article on the future of space exploration featuring an interview with the head of NASA.

However, the NASA head lamented the end of the space shuttle program in 2010, concerned that in the interim period at least the United States will be reliant on other nations to reach the heavens.

“There will be a gap. I don’t like it but there it is. For the US to lose even for a period of time independent access to space, I don’t think it’s a good thing.”

In the time between the shuttle retires and the new generation of US spacecraft — Orion — gets off the ground, US astronauts will have to rely on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station.

“I think that is a dangerous position to be in,” said Griffin. “If anything at all in that five-year period goes wrong with the Russian Soyuz … that is a great concern.”

As much as it costs, NASA is a tiny part of the federal annual budget. It is really stupid for us to have worked ourselves into any form of dependence on Russia, given its rising bellicosity, its use of Venezuela as a wedge into the Americas, its rearming, and its obvious bad intentions.   We will have cause to wish that past Congress critters had been a bit wiser, a bit less parsimonious in NASA funding, and a whole lot more far-seeing.

Apollo was canceled because Congress wanted to spend the money on social program, essentially. The Shuttle was a bizarre compromise between the military and NASA. And Congress has continued to starve NASA of funding for research and development of new space transportation systems, while finding money for ever expanding entitlement programs costing HUGELY more.  Just the PORK in every annual budget for the last 30 years would have seen us already on MARS and exploring the asteroids for resources.

The name for spending money on social short-term political benefit, instead of on R&D, is “eating your seed corn”.  You can’t plant it after you eat it.

Maybe that’s part of the reason the price of corn has gone up.

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Sep 28 2008

Private Space Flight gets closer

Category: economy,energy,science,space,technology — harmonicminer @ 6:09 pm

Unless I am mistaken, this is the first time a non-governmental organization or business has managed to put anything in orbit.

An Internet entrepreneur’s latest effort to make space launch more affordable paid off Sunday when his commercial rocket carrying a dummy payload was lofted into orbit.

It was the fourth attempt by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to launch its two-stage Falcon 1 rocket into orbit.

The Hawthorne, California-based rocket maker was started by multimillionaire Elon Musk, who made his fortune as co-founder of the PayPal Inc. electronic payment system.

The rocket carried a 364-pound (165-kilogram) dummy payload designed and built by SpaceX for the launch.

Wow. Harbinger of things to come, I hope.

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Jul 23 2008

Jerry Pournelle on education, Intelligent Design, etc.

Category: education,Evolution,higher education,Intelligent Design,science,technology,university — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

Jerry Pournelle (the wikipedia article linked here gives short shrift to Pournelle’s science and engineering background) has some thoughts on the dangers of trying to ban the teaching of Intelligent Design in the schools, and he starts with the background of public education and goes from there.

What is the purpose of public schools? One looks in vain for guidance in the Constitution of the US, or in the early constitutions of most states. Education didn’t become a right until well after the Civil War, and didn’t become a federal right until fairly recently.

Continue reading “Jerry Pournelle on education, Intelligent Design, etc.”

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