Monthly Archives: July 2010

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Energy independence for sewage-eating robot

This story’s all over the place, at venues as diverse as Hack-A-Day and Mike Anissimov’s blog… and with good reason. Here’s the lede from PhysOrg:

UK researchers have developed an autonomous robot with an artificial gut that enables it to fuel itself by eating and excreting. The robot is the first bot powered by biomass to be demonstrated operating without assistance for several days. Being self-sustaining would enable robots of the future to function unaided for long periods.

Yup, you read that right – this machine eats a kind of organic slurry, digests the nutrients in it and then craps out the waste. Not quite so elegant (or do I mean sinister?) as the proposed rat-eating household bot we mentioned a while back, eh?

Joking aside, this is quite a big deal – energy-autonomous machines could do all sorts of amazing things, and some scary ones too. It also stirs up the same arguments about “artificial life” as the Venter announcement, albeit coming from a very different angle: if I remember my GCSE biology right, eating and excreting are two pillars of the scientific definition of biological life, and there’s a machine that does both as well as being capable of independent movement. Interesting times, people, interesting times.

Speaking of sewage and energy, we could probably be getting some of our household wattage from human waste, and there’s a pilot scheme for biomethane recapture from sewage here in the UK at the moment. But gas is tricky and dangerous to store and pipe – why not cut out the middle man and just get the energy out of the sewage directly? To be truthful, there’s still a middle man… billions of them, in fact. Apparently certain nanoparticle coatings applied to graphite anodes in sewage tanks encourage certain bacteria to proliferate, eating sewage and releasing electrons all the while. Your biowaste gets cleaned up, and you produce electricty at the same time! Sounds almost too good to be true… but they’ve got it working in a lab environment, so you never know.

Blasphemous Geometries

Roleplaying Games and the Cluttered Self

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Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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0: Hume

Have you ever looked at an old photograph of yourself or read one of your old letters or emails and marvelled at the differences between the person you are now and the person you were then?  Getting older means falling into the habit of shrieking “what was I thinking?” whenever you stumble across some fragment of a former life.  But let us take this idea a little further: are you actually the same person that you were when you wrote that letter?  When you had that photograph taken?  When you decided to start dating that person who was obviously so ill suited to you?  Are you the same person you were yesterday?  Or five minutes ago?  Or when you started reading this sentence?  The 18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume suggested that you might very well not be. Continue reading Roleplaying Games and the Cluttered Self →

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New market for near-future mil-SF stories! Erm, US Central Command?

Major General (retired) Robert Scales is a big fan of Orson Scott Card, and he’s found a receptive market for his own fictionalised visions of the future: the guy who may well end up in charge of US Central Command.

Earlier this year, Scales and Mattis were sharing ideas about the next generation of small units — something the two iconoclastic senior officers have done repeatedly over the last six years.

But rather than codify the notions into a formal policy paper or into a PowerPoint briefing, Mattis asked Scales to write him a story. “One of his favorite pieces is Ender’s Game,” Scales says, referring to the science-fiction classic. In that spirit, Scales penned “Jerry Smith’s War: 2025.”

I’m not sure he’s quite up to the prose standard we choose to publish here at Futurismic… 😉

In truth, Scales has been doing futurist work for the US military for years, and this latest effort is part of his push to upgrade small in-the-field units with networked technologies: head-up displays, multiple channels of communication between memebers of the unit as well as between the unit and the command and support infrastructure, so on and so forth.The sort of stuff we’ve been reading about in novels for decades, in other words.

In fact, I wonder just how many ideas Scales has pitched which were thought up by (proper) sf writers first? I hope he does his due diligence searches on Technovelgy so he can give credit where it’s due… after all, I bet he’s raking down much more than SFWA professional per-word rates from his buddies at the Pentagon.

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Satellite rejuvenation stations could reduce orbital junk

We already know that there’s a whole lot of junk at the top of the gravity well; a lot of it is dead satellites, and as much as we could blast the things apart, it’d probably be a lot more economical to ensure they have a longer working life. Enter MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates, a Canadian outfit who propose building an orbital platform for refuelling and repairing ailing satellites:

MDA wants to fill that niche by launching a satellite refueling station that can track down and dock with satellites in the sky, filling them up with hydrazine and performing small repairs. Such a service could double, or even triple, the lives of satellites already flying, provided their on-board instruments are still working properly.

But such a refueling station isn’t the same as pulling up to the gas pump, or even refueling a jet in flight. Satellites are roaring through space at nearly 7,000 miles per hour, so a fueling station would have to first catch the satellite in motion, then somehow finagle the fueling port open with a robotic arm of some kind — if, that is, the door hasn’t been seared closed by years of exposure to space. It’s been done exactly twice before, but both times it happened under experimental conditions where the satellite and the refueling vehicle were both new and designed to be compatible.

Still, it’s not impossible and MDA thinks it could make $100 million a year servicing satellites which themselves are very expensive to replace.

Another potentially lucrative business model for commercial space companies, and a lot less adventurous than asteroid mining (though I suspect it may turn out to be more technically challenging in some respects). It also looks (to my layman’s eye, at least) more sensible than the previously-mooted idea of sending up wandering repairbots.

Probably too little too late for poor old Zombiesat, though.

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Tearing down the walls between “boy” and “girl”

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Well, this is heartening: an opinion piece in New Scientist arguing in favour of dismantling the gender divide.

Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different. But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus stereotypes suggest. Nor are the reasoning, speaking, computing, empathising, navigating and other cognitive differences fixed in the genetic architecture of our brains. All such skills are learned, and neuro-plasticity – the modification of neurons and their connections in response to experience – trumps hard-wiring every time. If men and women tend towards different strengths and interests, it is due to a complex developmental dance between nature and nurture that leaves ample room to promote non-traditional skills in both sexes.

The obvious place to start looking for behavioural differences between the sexes is infancy. Yet even here they are often in the eye of the beholder. In a classic experiment, researchers cross-dress babies to fool people that they are interacting with a child of the opposite sex. Volunteers tend to comment more on the physical strength and negative emotions of babies they believe to be boys, and on the beauty and positive emotions of babies they believe to be girls.

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So should we abandon our search for the “real” differences between the sexes? Yes. There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired: every skill, attribute, and personality trait is moulded by experience. At no time are children’s brains more malleable than in early life – the time when parents are so eager to learn the baby’s sex, project it to others and unconsciously express stereotyped impressions of their child.

It’s a timely topic, brought into the public eye by celebrity gossip (what else?): Angelina Jolie’s decision to let her four year old daughter dress as she pleases – short haircut, traditionally “male” clothes – is a pretty good barometer for comparing the opinions of different demographics. For example, compare the Feministing headline for this story (“Angelina Jolie responds to gender policing of Shiloh“) with that from FOX Nation (“Angelina Jolie Lets Daughter Gender-Bend?“).

Sadly, essentialist views of gender differences are deeply entrenched in the conservative and fundamentalist worldviews, both of which tend to place adherence to tradition above and beyond the well-being and freedom of the individual; regular readers of this site probably don’t need reminding that I tend to see things quite the other way round. Nonetheless, it’s great to see this topic becoming a matter for public discussion; sure, it’ll stir up a whole lot of dumb uninformed invective (from extremist positions on both sides of the debate, sadly), but cultural change comes with friction as standard.

And who knows – maybe we’ll end up with a society that finds the notion of applying experimental hormone treatments to your unborn child in the hope of nipping any potential gender ambiguity in the bud to be a repugnant act of cultural eugenics. Fingers crossed, eh?