Sunday night Stephen Gordon was joined by guest cohost Michael Darling. Michael is a longtime commenter and independent thinker at the Speculist.
Among many other topics they talked about the Star Trek technologies that are becoming real world inventions. No. Quick and easy (and routine) plastic surgery is not, yet, one of those technologies. But just about everything else is becoming, at least, theoretically possible.
Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:
Just got home from watching Cloverfield, the much anticipated new monster movie from producer J. J. Abrams. Stephen and special guest Tobias Buckell and I speculated a little about this movie on a recent FFR. We had a few questions:
1. What exactly is the monster?
2. Will the monster ever be shown?
3. Once it is shown, won’t it all be sort of a let down?
I’m very pleased to report that the answers to these questions are:
1. Beats the heck out of me.
2. More or less.
3. Nope.
I’m also pleased to report that Cloverfield does not disappoint on any level. The closest I came to being disappointed by the film was in seeing, very near the end, about five seconds more of the monster than I really wanted. But in this age of movies that hit us over the head, across the shoulders, down the middle, and back up again by every possible angle of every variation of every fantastic image we could never even hope to imagine, the thing that impresses me most about Cloverfield’s treatment of its subject is summed up in one magic word: restraint.
By limiting the POV to what can be seen through the viewfinder of a handheld camcorder, director Matt Reeves has given us an up-close and in-your-face, at times almost claustrophobic, victim’s-eye view of a city under siege by Some Great Big Thing.
Think Godzilla meets the Blair Witch.
Even so, the movie is neither sparing with its shocks nor parsimonious with its special effects. Once the action starts, you’re hooked. I was quite literally on the edge of my seat several times during the brief 90 minutes or so that Cloverfield requires to tell its tale.
Although the action is all limited to what goes on in a single camcorder, the story involves us in several plot lines, and even manages to pull off a credible flashback sequence which frames the main narrative. There is nothing particularly deep or complex about the soap-opera lives of the beautiful young people on whom this adventure falls, but I have to admit that I got so caught up in their personal drama in the first 10-15 minutes of the movie that it almost came as a shock when the first KAPOW! hit and suddenly I was watching a monster movie.
I won’t say anymore. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone. Okay, except one thing: a number of disgruntled teenagers in my immediate vicinity were highly disappointed by the ending, one even claiming he was going to ask for his money back. All I can tell you is that the end of the movie is clearly spelled out both in the opening frames of the film and in the trailer that I’m sure we’ve all seen by now.
To quote another highly entertaining film: are you watching closely?
Anyhow, go see Cloverfield. You’ll like it.
Last November Network World published “The Top 10 Real Life Star Trek Inventions.” The list ranges from very practical (cloaking devices for tanks) to silly (photon torpedo coffins).
Yesterday they added a new invention to the list – the universal translator.
A few days ago I described a laptop for “end-of-year 2009.”
Closed it’s impossibly thin – maybe a quarter inch thick. You open it up and the upper half is entirely screen. The lower half is keyboard and touchpad…
Ten days later it now looks like I was describing the MacBook Air:
This really is a thing of beauty. But to make the device this thin a couple of compromises were made. It has no optical drive. They argue, somewhat convincingly, that you won’t miss it. You can get an external drive if you like, but they are pushing the idea that you can use the optical drive of other computers wirelessly.
The other compromise is that there are no built-in stereo speakers. There’s a mono speaker. But Apple really envisions you using earbuds or plugging into a stereo.
In a way, this is what I’m already doing with my latest laptop. The stereo quality of my new machine is less than my last because the thinner profile meant smaller speakers. The MacBook Air just takes this compromise to the ultimate end. Why bother with built-in stereo if the quality is bad?
Maybe the next generation MacBook Air will incorporate stereo into the screen with SurfaceSound technology.
I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords with their thought-controlled robotic henchmen.
Of course, the real point of this research is that if monkey’s can do it, so can humans. So the serious question about the future that we all have to face is whether we will go with straight-up thought-controlled robotic henchmen, or whether we will develop a human-monkeybrain interface whereby what we think will be carried out by the monkeys, and what the monkeys think (as instructed by us) will by carried out by the robots. I personally prefer this model, in that I get not only henchman, but a tiered reporting structure as well.
But that’s just me
Also, if it matters, this research might have some kind of obscure side benefits for victims of paralysis:
In a major step toward helping victims of paralysis walk again, researchers at Duke University Medical Center today announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots.
The Duke researchers, working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes that gathered signals from her brain’s motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells’ responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya’s legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted in real time from their lab in Durham, N.C., to control the commands of a five-foot-tall humanoid robot (see video here) in Kyoto, Japan.
That part all seems a little far-out to me. But who knows? Maybe the human interest angle will help them keep the work funded.
Via GeekPress.
Saturn has announced that it will sell a plug-in version of the Saturn Vue in late 2009. Toyota will sell a plug-in Prius in 2010. The Chevy Volt will also have a plug-in version in 2010.
Plug-ins will be compared to each other on how far they will be able to travel as electric vehicles per charge. The Saturn plug-in will run 10 miles on electric per charge. The Prius will only go 7 miles. The Volt (pictured above) will go 40 miles per charge.
That 30 mile advantage for the Volt over the other plug-ins will make a huge difference at the pump. Running as an EV is the equivalent of paying $.75 cents per gallon for gasoline. And being able to go 40 miles per charge means that many people won’t have to burn gas at all during their daily commutes. I wouldn’t. But I would burn some gas with the Saturn and Prius plug-ins.
Of course I’m burning gas with my current vehicle. Plug-ins, even ones with modest EV ranges, will be a huge step forward.
UPDATE: GM is calling the Volt their “Moon shot.” And, just in case you’re not convinced that this is a race…
There’s nothing magic about the technology. Two or three years after the Volt is introduced, everybody will have something like it. We’d just like to be first for once.
-GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz
No, we’re not quite there, yet. But it looks like we’re much closer than we were:
SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.
The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton†that created its shape was left.
Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor†cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.
The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.
However, Professor Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, believes it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, blood vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.The big advantage of such an approach is that organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them.
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,†Taylor said. “It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ – kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it.â€
The promise of this procedure would be difficult to overstate. To be able to give someone whose body has been devastated by heart or kidney disease a healthy organ with no need for a donor and with no real risk that that the transplanted organ will be rejected…that’s huge. I wonder if the same or a similar procedure could be used to re-grow seemingly simpler structures such as bones and teeth? Also, could the same or a similar process be used to replace sections of a damaged spinal cord?
Plus, I have to wonder what the possible life extension implications this development might have. There’s the question of the “age” of the new organ. If I’m 45 and I have a new heart grown in this manner and transplanted in, is it a 45 year old heart? Or is it younger? If younger, what would happen if a person swapped in a new pituitary gland grown in this manner? The new glad might start sending signals out to the older body telling it that it’s younger than it really is. Of course, this won’t repair accumulated cell damage, but this perhaps this could at least slow down the process of a body shutting itself down.
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon covered the future. They talked about the latest life extension news, how the $2,500 car will affect our prices at the pump, MRI mind reading, and whether a pill will reduce our need for sleep.
It wasn’t all serious news though. They also talked about the new Terminator television show, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” Don’t miss it!
Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:
An MRI can now show, with 78% accuracy, whether you’re thinking about a hammer or thinking about a pair of pliers. Apparently, even a few months ago, the same test could barely distinguish between major categories (e.g, whether the subject was thinking about “places or faces.”)
This a major step forward, but I think — all questions aside as to whether we actually want mind-reading technology — there is still a long way to go. What we’re seeing here is more a step forward in lie detection than actual mind reading. What goes on inside our brains involves a highly complex set of relationships between words, symbols, and images. At best, we’re only able to articulate an approximation of what we’re thinking via the spoken or written word (or visual media.)
The point is that we often don’t really know what we’re thinking. How then could a machine know, much less someone reading the output from the machine?
Wow, this is great news:
An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
They inject the drug entranercept in the spinal fluid and minutes later the patient is better.
I’ve watched as an elderly loved one faded with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a heart breaking and frustrating disease. There are moments of clarity when the victim is able to respond more normally. Its almost like they are intoxicated – still there – but unreachable.
The reason this drug is thought to work sheds light on the disease. A molecule called “TNF” (tumor necrosis factor-alpha) regulates neural activity so its an essential part of brain function. But the problem with Alzheimer patients is that they have too much TNF.
Entranercept binds with the excess TNF and the patient improves at once. The TNF intoxication is lifted.