Monthly Archives: June 2009

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Injectable arphid will let satellites track you world-wide (and maybe kill you)

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injectable RFID implantCausing a bit of a stir over in Germany is a patent filed by a Saudi Arabian gentlemen for a form of subcutaneous RFID chip which would allow remote global tracking of the person into whom it was injected.

The patent application – entitled “Implantation of electronic chips in the human body for the purposes of determining its geographical location” – was filed on October 30, 2007, but was only published until last week, or 18 months after submission as required by German law, she said.

“In recent times the number of people sought by security forces has increased,” the Jeddah-based inventor wrote in his summary.

The tiny electronic device […] would be suited for tracking fugitives from justice, terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals, political opponents, defectors, domestic help, and Saudi Arabians who don’t return home from pilgrimages.

Not too shocking on the surface, but it was one of the optional upgrades that caused the law firm representing the application to drop the case quickly:

After subcutaneous implantation, the chip would send out encrypted radio waves that would be tracked by satellites to confirm the person’s identity and whereabouts. An alternate model chip could reportedly release a poison into the carrier if he or she became a security risk.

Cute… thankfully the German patent system would probably have bounced the application on ethical grounds, but you don’t need a patent to make or use something like this.

And as science fictional as it blatantly is, it’s the political implausibility that stands out rather than the technological. Sadly, chipping people like we tag pets is likely to become quite the fashion in the more repressive nation-states of the world, but there’s certain to be a lively black market trade in removing and deactivating them too. [via Technovelgy; image by Nadya Peek]

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JK Rowling: probably not a plagiarist

Poor old JK Rowling; whatever you may think of the Harry Potter books (I think they make passable doorstops), there’s no denying that her success has brought her into the firing line of a lot of resentful (and less successful) creatives. As reported at TechDirt, Rowling is once again being accused of plaigiarising someone else’s work in order to create Hogwarts et al.

In these trigger-happy times of copyright law, cases like this are bound to come up – though it’s telling that you you have to make it pretty big before anyone will bother suing you. But the long-term implications and precedents are important to writers and other creatives – especially in science fiction and fantasy, which thrive on what has been described as their ongoing conversational nature. In a genre where building on (or dismantling and deconstructing) the ideas of your predecessors is an integral part of the game, a few successful suits of this type could open the gates to a flood of smaller cases; it seems there’s plenty of copyright lawyers who don’t care how spurious a case is provided there’s a chance of a decent fee. Here’s TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick:

The whole thing is pretty silly, of course. The publisher is vehemently denying any copying, and it seems unlikely that any copying did actually happen. However even if you did grant the premise and say that Rowling was “inspired” by some other book, so what? Did it really change the economics of the original book? If anything, this latest claim is just a clear money grab, designed to give new attention to a long-ignored book. No one could claim with a straight face that Rowling’s work took away any value from the other book.

Masnick also links back to an incident from last year that shows that not quite everything Orson Scott Card says is reactionary bigoted claptrap (though this example has some serious sexist undertones); commenting on the Harry Potter Lexicon case, Card pointed out that Rowling’s agressive defence of her own intellectual property hasn’t done her any favours, and that the world of literature is entirely based upon the adoption, adaptation and reuse of other people’s ideas. In defending herself against these latest accusations of plagiarism, she actually weakens the arguments she used to win the Lexicon case. Which all goes to show that copyright justice frequently boils down to a game of who can afford the better legal team… so, no news there, then.

Just to be abundantly clear, here, I’m not trying to claim that copyright law works in a way it doesn’t. The point I’m trying to make is that, as a reviewer, critic and wannabe writer of fiction, I’m well aware of the fact that there are only a few handfuls of basic story plots and character archetypes from which to start writing. The art of fiction is to flesh those essentials out into something new, but equally it’s possible to deconstruct and boil down any story into a simple synopsis that can make it sound remarkably similar to any number of other stories, without there having been any hint of deliberate copying involved in their creation. If we know that as readers and writers, how can we support a legal framework that can so easily exploit these phenomena in the name of financial gain?

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Laboratory lungs to replace rats

Got lungs?Briefly overcoming my kneejerk hatred of articles with the phrase “[x]-on-a-chip” in their headline, here’s a New Scientist article about a new development that could eradicate the need for lab rats in toxicology experiments. The basic idea: grow little spheres of lung tissue on a silicon substrate, enabling you to run multiple tests at once.

While the ethics of animal testing are a contributing factor here, there’s also a significant element of practicality:

… the European Union’s REACH regulations require about 30,000 chemicals to be tested for toxicity over the next decade. Yet testing the effects of inhaling a single dose of a particular chemical typically requires more than 200 rats, while testing the chronic effects of breathing it in over time can take more than 3000. Meanwhile the EU Cosmetics Directive – which covers items from deodorants and perfume to air-fresheners – seeks to ban all tests of cosmetics on animals by 2013.

The obvious alternative is to test chemicals on human cells grown in the lab. The difficulty, however, lies in enticing those cells to form complex tissue that responds as our organs do.

That difficulty hasn’t yet been overcome, but this project and others like it suggest that it’s far from insurmountable. Given the collosal advances in computer modelling in recent years, though, I wonder whether these artificial test organs will be in use for long before being superceded by software – which would not only be ethically sound but presumably much faster as well. [image by bbaunach]

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Pessimistic science fiction is a cop-out

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opportunity center signIt’s nearing the submission deadline for the Shine Anthology, and editor Jetse de Vries has heard every excuse under the sun from science fiction writers who cannot or will not write optimistic near-future science fiction stories. Indeed, he’s heard enough of them to taxonomise them into seven distinct categories, to which he has posted a lengthy rebuttal on the anthology blog. [image by streamishmc]

The excuses – and he really does see them as excuses – are as follows:

  1. (Deliberately) misinterpreting the meaning of ‘optimistic SF’.
  2. Optimism is not realistic.
  3. You cannot predict the near future exactly, so you might as well not try.
  4. There is no possibility for conflict in a full-on optimistic future.
  5. I can’t do it because we live in dire times.
  6. My downbeat SF story is meant as a cautionary tale.
  7. I will not confirm to your positivist agenda: nobody tells me what to write.

If you’re at all interested in short form science fiction, you should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts from the post:

This is a defence mechanism: most SF writers don’t want to write something that is too difficult, too risk-taking, and – dog forbid – relevant. They just want to write about something they find cool, and will throw up a barrage of excuses just to keep doing that. Those excuses are often dressed up as reasonable arguments, but more often than not what they really imply is: “Hey, I don’t want to this near future, optimistic stuff: I just want to stay in my comfort zone.” And indeed, that’s what most dystopias are: a comfort zone for unambitious writers.

[…]

There is a myth in writing circles that writers really like a challenge: tell a group of writers that they can’t do something and by golly, they will show you they can. Well, that myth is only true for simple challenges, like when Gordon Van Gelder said he didn’t like elves: immediately half the writing community brainstormed brilliant elf stories that would leave Gordon breathless.

However, now that I’m throwing out a real challenge – near future, optimistic SF – the utmost majority of the SF writing community is enormously reluctant at best, and downright dismissive at worst. Obviously, this is a challenge that doesn’t count. Well, I’ve got a message to all those writers who think they can ignore this challenge: get real, that is: look around in the real world.

[…]

There is a huge imbalance between pessimism and optimism in written SF today: the genre is overwhelmingly bleak. With Shine I’m trying to redress that lopsidedness somewhat. It’s a challenge: try your hand at this for just one short story only. But the general impression I’m getting from the SF ghetto is that ‘you’ll have to pry the pessimism from my cold, dead hands’ (exceptions acknowledged, of course). And indeed, if SF stops trying out new avenues, if it stops renewing itself, if it will not take risks, if it does not try to be relevant, then it will die.

At which point it can keep its bleakness.

The genre’s antipathy to change and new ideas is an observable phenomenon – one only need look to the backlash that Mundane SF produced for the proof – and Jetse’s dismantling of the seven excuses is lucid, logical and provocative. Essentially, all the defences boil down to one: I don’t wanna. And that’s fair enough, I guess – though it does somewhat put the lie to science fiction’s claim to be the foremost literature of the imagination.

There is one other excuse that Jetse misses off his list, though, possibly because it’s more honest than the others. As James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer puts it:

I’ve been trying and it’s really bloody hard! […] the three months I’ve been trying to write optimistic stories are not enough, I have a feeling that it’s a life time’s work. I’m not going to give up though.

Kudos to him for that – any sort of change takes effort and will, after all.

So, all you writers among Futurismic‘s audience: do you have an excuse that’s not on Jetse’s list?

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Science vs. engineering: Drexler waxes philosophical

engineering_scienceEric Drexler discusses the hinterland between two of the great pillars of human endeavour – science and engineering – and what they are:

Inquiry and design are seldom separate, so how can it be meaningful to call some activities “science”, and others “engineering”? I think it’s best to look beyond the mixture of inquiry and design in a project, and to consider instead its purpose. If the intended result is knowledge — a better model of what exists in the world and how it works — I think of it as science. If the intended result is a new product, process, or design methodology, I think of it as engineering.

This epistemiological discussion is with a serious goal in mind, to consider how emergent nanotechnological developments might be engineered to create products and processes we can all use:

Unlike high-energy particle physics or space science, nanotechnology springs from fields (surface science, materials science, chemistry, biology) that have no tradition of developing conceptual designs for complex systems, debating the knowns, unknowns, costs, benefits, alternative objectives, alternative solutions, and so forth, to eventually converge on objectives that coordinate the work of hundreds or thousands for a decade or more.

Without a tradition of this sort, large opportunities can go unrecognized — and in part because they are large. This will change, but I doubt that the change will be led from within.

It’s an interesting point. At what point does scientific research transfer into engineering development, and thence into entrepreneurial opportunity?

[image from jenny downing on flickr]