(farmgirl1146 poked me because I haven't posted in a while, so here is some classic Jack ranting for you...)

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the integrated circuit. In that time we have gone from five discrete components on chip (including transistors, capacitors, and resistors) to over a billion transistors alone. That is pushing nine orders of magnitude in five decades!

Can you imagine your life without IC's? Electronics technology not progressing past vacuum tubes or, at the best, top-hat transistors? Basically we would still be operating at a 1950's level: No MP3 players. No cellular phones. No personal computers. No Internet. No auto-sensing stoplights. And it doesn't stop there! Nearly everything about our lives and modern culture has been touched by microchips somehow, somewhere.

The truth is that chips are in nearly everything. They are pervasive almost beyond comprehension. They don't just provide cheap consumer products, they lower the cost of everything in our economy; from energy production, to manufacturing, to business management, to statistics gathering, to shipping, to beyond. They make our lives better, albeit somewhat more complex. They make our lives longer, via better drugs and medical techniques not previously available. They even enable lifestyles that would be impossible without them. (Some might argue this isn't a benefit, but the point stands.)

All this in fifty years. To really get a feel for this telescoping of technological windows you need to think historically: We took tens of thousands of years to go from writing on clay tablets to printing on lead type. We took thousands of years to go from water-wheels to steam engines. We took hundreds of years to go from a basic understanding of chemical reactions to making dyes and epoxies from coal and oil. Each of these leaps was shorter than the previous. All of them together took us only to the Industrial Revolution. After that we moved into the Atomic Age within seventy years and to Internet Time within fifty.

And only ten years from that to you reading this...

The timescale keeps compressing and the technology moves ahead by orders of magnitude at each historical quantum level. What is the next step? Today, at work, I emailed around a link to a Wired article about the anniversary of the IC, the same one that I link to at the beginning of this essay. In one of the responses I was asked "Can you imagine 50 years from now?"

I had to answer that I couldn't imagine 50 years from now. Hell, if Vernor Vinge is right I can't imagine it by definition!

But, you know what? I think it might be something like this clip om the movie “Waking Life”, where real-life chemist Eamonn Healy is ranting about 'Telescopic Evolution':

In an attempt to show how capable the open source Blender 3D animation application is, the Blender community has created a short subject and distributed it with a Creative Commons license.



Complete video here.

I'd say this is pretty convincing proof that Blender is up to the task of creating animations as good as any from the commercial competition. To me this raises another question: By lowering the cost of entry, will this mean we get more animated works from outside the established production houses?

Mind you the real cost of an animated video isn't the 3D modeling tools or even the render farms. The single biggest expense is the time of the many creative individuals you need to drive those tools. That factor doesn't change. But it does mean that these creatives now have access to a free alternative toolset and therefore we may have more artists and animators learning how to use them.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Of course someone could really change the game by coming up with an animation tool simple enough to use that it lowers the total hours required for a minute of animation by a full order of magnitude. If that happens, all bets are off.

Quite a while ago I talked about short-run manufacturing and 'de-industrialization'. Later I followed that up with a post about feeding the long tail with hardware and one on producing 'sui generis' goods with rapid prototyping technology.

I mention these older posts because I want to establish my bonifides as an 'amateur futurist' in this area. To clarify: I have been closely watching the development of rapid prototyping and short-run manufacturing technologies for some time now because I think these are true disruptive technologies capable of causing large-scale changes in the world's economic landscape. Exactly how those changes will play out are unknown right now, but I point out some possibilities in my de-industrialization post.

Over the next few months I am going to delve into this subject more deeply. I intend to produce a series of essays about different aspects of this kind of rapid manufacturing technology. Moreover, I intend to personalize the impact of rapid manufacturing technology by showing you how it might play out in your and my own lives, in our own homes.

Why this? Why now? As I said, this is an area I have followed for a while and can claim some expertise in. Plus it has suddenly become a hot subject with the RepRap project recently announcing they have achieved replication. (Just look at the Technorati results for 'RepRap Replication' if you don't think this is a hot topic.)

In actual fact the 'replication' achieved by the RepRap is a bit underwhelming if you are thinking in terms of a true self-replicating machine. What they really did was to build a simple thermoplastic deposition cartesian robot capable of re-creating the plastic brackets which hold itself together. All the other parts (circuit boards, stepper motors, metal rods, heating elements, and so on) must be created separately from the machine, not to mention their component parts (like microchips and copper wire).

But you have to start somewhere. The long-term goal of the RepRap project is the creation of a device which can completely replicate itself from mostly base materials like plastic and metal. This sounds like the stuff of Science Fiction, and it is, but it is also something entirely possible with extensions to known technology! It is something that could be done without requiring nanotechnology or some other magic we don't know how to create yet.

I call this kind of device an 'Omnifacture': A machine capable of creating nearly anything, including copies of itself. (I first used that term in an SF story written about 1988.) Step by step the RepRap guys are walking the path towards creating a non-fictional Omnifacture. And they are doing it Open Source all the way; sharing their designs and software with the world as they go.

Time now to get to the point and clearly explain the 'why this' and 'why now' for this post: Quite simply, I've decided to join the revolution...

Today I ordered the full electronics kit for a RepRap Darwin. (Yes, I need another project like I need a hole in my head. So sue me.) I expect it will take me way too long to turn it into operating hardware, but I intend to bring all of you along for the ride. In fact, should anyone reading this want to get their hands dirty I encourage you to join me in a more physical way; in my garage or your own. I will be starting a Seattle RepRap Users Group (RUG) as soon as possible, but you don't have to live nearby. All you need is a little money and some basic skills and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone.

Things are going to change in a big way. I want to be part of it when it happens. How about you?

The Phoenix Mars lander has landed safe and healthy. Here's wishing it success in its mission!

Five months ago I wrote a futurism essay about a possible technology which would change picture taking forever: Capturing a perfect moment.

Today Immersive Media publicly announced their Dodeca 2360 camera. Yeah, pretty close to the first generation of the technology I predicted. No, I didn't know about this beforehand.

Does that mean I get a Futurist Point?

There's a guy at work who often wears a t-shirt that reads "There's no place like 127.0.0.1".

If you live a significant portion of your life online you might find there is some truth to that t-shirt. It used to be said that 'home is where you hang your hat', but today home is usually where you can get wifi on your laptop. Given an Internet connection you can chat with your friends, check your mail, pay your bills, play games, watch videos, keep up with the latest gossip, you name it. If you are into Metaverses like Second Life or MMORPGs like WoW you might even have a virtual 'home' you can hang out in online, complete with furniture and pictures on the walls.

One could argue that home is the place you keep your stuff. The problem with these virtual homes is that none of them are places where you can keep all your virtual stuff. Sure, in Second Life you can keep things appropriate to Second Life. Same for Facebook or LiveJournal. But what about documents and media files? What about 'valuable' things like passwords? Where do you keep that stuff?

Right now you probably have your virtual stuff scattered over several different computers, media players, and maybe even a 'thumb drive' or two. And this represents a problem. It would be nice if you could store it all on the Internet somehow. Someplace where you could get to whatever you need from anywhere you can open up a browser window. Only you can't.

Certainly, there are appropriate online places for nearly all of it. For documents you can keep word processor and spreadsheet files in Google Docs and others of its ilk. Links can easily be saved with del.icio.us or other social bookmarking sites. There are similar sites offering 'secure' online storage for things like passwords.

There just isn't one place to bring it all together under one 'roof'. And there is another problem: Trust. To what extent do you trust these sites (no matter what their corporate motto is) to keep private the things you want to keep private? You probably already have more personal information about you freely available on the Internet than you are comfortable with. And the problem is only going to get worse as you start to capture more stuff you care about in the form of bits and bytes.

I have a feeling someone soon is going to offer an online service to provide you with a single place to keep all your stuff, along with the tools you need to locate which stuff you need when you want it and work with it when you need to change it or use it. That will be great, except for that trust problem I mentioned before. And there are other issues. Like, what if they go out of business? Or what if they have a fire and it turns out they didn't do as good a job backing things up as they advertised? What then?

Can I suggest an alternative? Don't keep it in one place. Keep it everywhere instead...

There is an existing online anonymizing system called TOR (a recursive acronym for TOR is Onion Routing). TOR works by splitting up messages you send and receive into encrypted chunks and spreading them around hundreds or even thousands of other TOR nodes. There have been several experiments at doing similar things for files; mostly revolving around file sharing systems, but appropriate for this purpose as well. One, Freenet, is very similar to the kind of system I am describing here.

The idea is to tear your data up into little bits and spread it out across thousands of nodes made up of computers belonging to other people like yourself. This is done in a way that lets you get to that data and bring it back together, but only you. (OK, only you within the normal limits of your password getting out or someone finding a way to hack the system. Nothing is perfect. Including the door lock on your physical house) Combine this with some changes to browser technology to work with this distributed data store and some nice indexing tools to help you find that file you can't quite remember the name of and you could have a virtual home for all your stuff. One not residing on any property you personally own, yet available to you anywhere, anytime.

All in one place. Safe.

Or, rather, safe if you can trust the computer you access it from. Safe if your government doesn't require you to cough up your keys on demand. Safe if some criminal doesn't figure out a way to break in and steal it. In other words, pretty much as safe as a real home.

I can live with that level of safety. But then I am fine storing documents on Google and sharing links with del.icio.us. Personally I am more concerned with the existential angst about going home raised by a certain Supertramp song. (Lyrics.)

We've all been there. That perfect moment that you want to last forever. Maybe it is a sunset and a lover watching it with you. Maybe it is a child's first steps, a box of puppies on a sunny day, or a steelhead taking the hook at your favorite fishing hole. Maybe it is hearing an old song in a new way at a rock concert. Maybe it is simply standing inside a cathedral as clouds move across the sun and fill the nave with a shifting kaleidescope through the stained glass...

Whatever that perfect moment is, you know it when it happens and you know you will never be able to capture it in a way you could share it with others or (most sadly of all) with your own future self. Yet it is a very human thing to try -- from cave paintings to HD cameras, we have applied technology to the problem with varying degrees of success.

And yet, in most cases the best we can do is to capture a memento of that perfect moment; the personal equivalent of a snow globe from Las Vegas. Often little more than something to jog our own memory and almost never enough to put another person into the same space we inhabited right then. This is why we love to show our vacation pictures and others find them so boring.

(Interestingly, we have focused largely on visual representations as mementos despite the fact memory is tied more strongly to the sense of smell. Recent research indicates that you can even force the loss of long term memory in rats via blocking a brain enzyme related to olfactory processing.)

Of course, to some extent the quality of our mementos is dependent on the person making it. There is a definite artistic component involved, whether the person is sketching with charcoal or taking a photograph. If someone is good enough with a particular medium they can bring us, more or less, into that perfect moment. If the artist is truly good we invoke our imagination, suspend our belief in our current reality and, (almost magically) we inhabit that moment in a way that transcends the limitations of the medium. But, like all art, this response is personal and only works for those attuned to it. The next person to look at the painting or watch the movie in question may have a different, and less moving, experience.

Still technology marches on and that which was only available to the rich becomes a tool of the masses. We are rapidly approaching the moment when half the planet will carry a camera-equipped cell phone in their pocket. The quality and quantity of mementos produced increases even if the people making them lack the skill and perceptions of the true artist. We saw the first step in this evolution with the Brownie camera and now we have easily affordable HD camcorders and panoramic cameras.

Recently we entered into Steam Engine Time for the technology of creating mementos: The tools have reached a cusp point. Everything required is there to enable anyone to capture a moment in a way that makes inhabiting that perfect moment anytime in the future a better quality experience than the best great artists can accomplish with the mediums currently at their disposal. All it takes is a little integration work.

I could create this technology myself. Give me six months, an electrical engineer, and four other programmers and I could demo a consumer device that represents the first stage of this new memento technology. Give me twenty programmers and another year and I could give you the second stage. The third, and final, stage requires some technology that isn't ready for prime time, but is getting there.

And, if I can think of this thing, most likely someone else, smarter and better funded that I, has as well. Somewhere in the world engineers are already working to make this new device a reality. What will the first version look like?

There would be a base unit. It might look like a pole on a conical stand or it might be something you can mount on a camera tripod. Besides the base unit there will be at least three, and possibly more, satellite units that look much like the base unit, only smaller. At the top of each unit will be a rotating camera and a stereo microphone. To use it you will place the base unit in the center of the place you want to record and scatter the satellite units around at some distance to record the same scene from other angles.

That's pretty much it, other than some software to integrate the results. When activated the device would establish the exact positions of all its units and then scan its surroundings for a short period of time. The results would be fed into the integration software and the end result would be a looping 3D animation of the place and time you wanted to record. If the software (or the person operating it) was really good, and the recorded scene supported it, you could even make the loop seamless to the extent that it would be difficult to tell when the loop reached its end and started over. When replaying it you could 'walk' around the recorded space and time in any way you liked, inspecting many details and hearing the ambient sounds as if you were actually there. Yes, it would be on a computer screen. But it would be amazingly detailed and lifelike, barring some artifacts introduced by the recording process and the software.

How can this be? Converting photographs into 3D models is nothing new, but recent improvements in visualization software have enabled a whole new landscape of possibilities. As I said, all the other pieces (panoramic cameras, 3D rendering, virtual environments) already exist; all it takes is putting it together.

And this is just the first stage. The second stage will do the same thing without the satellite units or by automatically deployed satellites (perhaps autonomous remote units the size of flies) and the results will have much higher definition than the first stage. Moving elements like humans, animals, and machines will be rendered with much more precision and detail. The playback technology will improve as well, possibly via head mounted displays.

The third stage? Just improve the second stage incrementally and add the ability to record smells as well.

Like any medium, this new one will work best in the hands of the true artist. But even the most thumb-fingered individual will be able to record amazingly lifelike representations of a child hitting their first home run. It will enable new arts as well; interactive 'movies' may finally enter into the mainstream. Websites could host the scenes to allow a form of virtual tourism. Places that do not exist or that cannot be reached may be rendered by artists so that we can enjoy a concert in fairy-land or stroll on the surface of the sun.

The only downside is the distinct possibility that experiencing something with all this detail may not be anywhere as good as simply remembering it from behind a filter of years...

Over at Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster is on a roll lately. First a long discussion of an alternate propulsion technology called the Mach-Lorentz Thruster. (Could this be the return of the Dean Drive?) Then Paul asks "Is there a message in our DNA?"

Read them both!

The New Yorker has an interesting article about the Antikythera Mechanism:

Looking back over the first fifty years of research on the Mechanism, one is struck by the reluctance of modern investigators to credit the ancients with technological skill. The Greeks are thought to have possessed crude wooden gears, which were used to lift heavy building materials, haul up water, and hoist anchors, but historians do not generally credit them with possessing scientifically precise gears—gears cut from metal and arranged into complex “gear trains” capable of carrying motion from one driveshaft to another. Paul Keyser, a software developer at I.B.M. and the author of “Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era,” told me recently, “Those scholars who study the history of science tend to focus on science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and Harvey, and often go so far as to assert that no such thing existed before.” It’s almost as if we wished to reserve advanced technological accomplishment exclusively for ourselves. Our civilization, while too late to make the fundamental discoveries that the Greeks made in the sciences—Euclidean geometry, trigonometry, and the law of the lever, to name a few—has excelled at using those discoveries to make machines. These are the product and proof of our unique genius, and we’re reluctant to share our glory with previous civilizations.

You know, I used to compain about growing up and not getting the rocket belt the magazines promised me when I was a kid. Then I found out some people were making their own rocket belts. Which was cool, but I've already got enough hobby projects not getting finished.

Now? It turns out there is finally someone making rocket belts you can buy! Of course there remains that nasty little problem of flight times measured in seconds. And it costs a cool quarter million dollars. But who cares? It's a rocket belt!

Bill Walker tells us Why There's No Cure for the Common Cold.

Bill makes a good point, of course, but in the process he ignores one reality: Biotech is potentially more dangerous than computer science. Personally I would argue that this doesn't matter a hell of a lot simply because those people we don't want getting their hands on that kind of tech aren't stopped by the FDA. Slowed down maybe. Find getting funding more difficult. But they don't let a few rules get between them and their aims.

So, from my point of view, why not open biotech up and see if the good outweighs the bad? (Feel free to disagree in the comments, but please avoid loaded terms like 'fatuous'; I certainly cannot argue that the current US political climate makes deregulation likely...)

(Hat tip to Flutterby.)

Chip implanted in brain interfaces quadriplegic man to a computer.

While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: singularity]. However, due to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or educational loans.

Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request from the City. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]

Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and, in event of an incurable ailment or injury a new body may be provided–for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any pre-existing medical conditions or handicaps, consult the City.

(From Charles Stross' 'Elector'.)

Previous Cyborg Me:

1. Eye-implantable miniature telescope

(Edit: Fixed link to news article.)

Pennsylvania's game commissioner has given preliminary approval for deer hunting with a spear. Actually, with an atlatl; a spear throwing device some twenty-thousand years old.

I'm guessing that, if this catches on, someone is going to start selling carbon fiber atlatl's that throw high-tech aluminum alloy, titanium tipped spears. Think I'm kidding?

Talk about everything old being new again...

A huge, obsessively compiled, website with hundreds of spacecraft (imagined and real), shown to different scales.

Prepare to waste lots of time if you try to look at everything.

Dr. Ben Wang at Florida A&M is working on 'buckypaper' which promises to be 10 times lighter than steel, and 250 times stronger! As you might guess, buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes:

"At FAC2T, our objective is to push the envelope to find out just how strong a composite material we can make using buckypaper," Wang said. "In addition, we're focused on developing processes that will allow it to be mass-produced cheaply."

The 'mass-produced cheaply' part is pretty interesting, mostly because the raw-materials and energy costs of making carbon nanotubes is much less than steel. Currently we have no process for mass-production of carbon nanotubes, but if we did the market for steel as a structural material would collapse, the cost and weight of everything from skyscrapers to automobiles would drop like a stone, and the economic ripple effects would be dramatic.

And that is leaving aside the fact that carbon nanotube materials like buckypaper are highly conductive and would also find use in consumer electronics, avionics, and computers.

Or perhaps you just want to write about rockets in a Science Fiction story? Either way, Atomic Rocket is a good place to start.

Randall Parker unearths clues that nuclear power is making a comeback.

Bob Metcalfe's original sketch for the Ethernet concept. Note how WiFi was part of the base specification!