Category Archives: Blog

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Touchscreen tech goes 3D

People keep doing clever stuff with touchscreen interfaces, despite a continuing dearth of products bigger than a smartphone that actually include one. Some chaps from the University of Potsdam have been working at making a Microsoft Surface touchscreen computer detect items that aren’t necessarily directly in contact with it:

Each Lumino block has a pattern on its base that identifies its 3D shape, and the Surface table can read them using its four internal cameras that peer up at the acrylic top. That means the computer can build up a 3D picture of what lies on its surface.

The Luminos can also make themselves known to the Surface when they’re stacked up, however. They are packed with fibre-optic threads that ferry the pattern of any block placed on top of another down to the screen. So, although a second storey Lumino isn’t in direct contact with the touch screen, the computer knows it’s there.

As blocks stack up, the risk increases that the patterns from different layers of Luminos will become too jumbled for the screen to interpret. But the fibre-optic bundles are angled so that the pattern visible to the screen at the bottom of a stack includes parts of the patterns of all its blocks. That can allow the screen to recognise stacks up to 10 blocks high.

I really want some hardware like that for use as a combined coffee-table and workbench… though I think I’ll wait until someone other than Microsoft is making them.

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Changing the world with Charter Cities

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Melbourne, Australia by nightMany thanks to former Futurismic staffer and all-round top bloke Tobias Buckell for flagging up an interview with Paul Romer at the NYT Freakonomics blog, which pushed a whole bunch of my buttons at once. [image by geoftheref]

Romer’s big idea is that of the Charter City: a developing nation strikes a deal with one or more developed nations, providing a plot of land in exchange for the institutional stability of its partner or partners. A city-state is declared and built, policed and regulated by the foreign nation but populated by citizens of the developing nation who want to take a shot at a better life. Foreign investment pours in, as does population; the resulting nexus of stability acts as beacon and white blood cell to the rest of the developing nation, and to others much like it. Romer explains in more detail on his website:

Today’s world offers little chance for large-scale migration. The hundreds of millions of people who want to move to places with better rules aren’t allowed in. Charter cities will become the places where they can go.

Cities are the right scale for implementing entirely new rules. A coherent set of rules can let millions of people work together and create enormous value on a small tract of land. Because cities are also relatively self-contained, the internal rules in one can differ from the rules in all of its trading partners.

Urbanization is the key to the predictable transformation from an economy where most people earn a precarious living in subsistence agriculture (doing great harm to the environment in the process) to one in which most people work in manufacturing and services. The transformation is inevitable; current estimates suggest that an additional 3 billion people will move to cities this century.

The quality of their lives will depend on whether these are well-run cities with good rules, or dysfunctional cities with bad rules. Many people continue to move into urban slums with no running water, high crime rates, few steady jobs, and sewage in the streets. The embedded, interlocking systems of bad rules that lead to this type of dysfunction will be exceedingly difficult for existing cities to change from within.

A new charter city offers a speedier path to better rules. People who live there, even people who start out earning very little, can live in housing that is safe and sanitary, send their children to school, find work, and live free from fear of crime.

Now, this is a fascinating idea – the sort of thing that sets off little cascades of story ideas in my mind (which, based on past form, I’ll never get round to doing anything with until reality has rendered them redundant). I’ll say outright that I can see a lot of flaws in it (not least of which is the alarmingly totalitarian undercurrent implicit in the idea of a city into which many may legally arrive but few may leave – Berlin Wall, anyone?), but there’s a core of logic in there that rings true. The interview with Romer addresses some of the more obvious criticisms, and is well worth a read:

Freakonomics: Why will governments, particularly the entrenched, corrupt governments found in many countries, be willing to cede control of these zones?

Romer: First let me push back on an assumption that many people make and that seems to be implicit in your question. This assumption is that “bad guys” are why so many people are stuck living under bad rules. If you were a good guy and were the mayor of New York, would you be able to build enough consensus to implement congestion pricing for traffic, at least within our lifetimes? Or would you be strong enough to be able to coerce the people who don’t want it to go along?

Narratives about good guys and bad guys are always entertaining, but there is a deeper reason why people get stuck under bad rules. For those of us who live in the United States, it is easier to understand in a context like New York that is more familiar. It is quite possible that its existing political system will never allow an improvement like congestion pricing, and yet many people would happily move to a new city that had sensible pricing and smoothly flowing traffic at all hours of the day. Systems of rules are “sticky”; they are difficult for any leader or group to change.

Most of the “designed nations” that I can think of came to sticky ends or fizzled out early, but they tended to be more obviously (and naively) utopian in concept than Romer’s ideas, which seem to be a form of free-market capitalism tempered by a bit of common sense about human failings and the frailty of political and economic systems. Would charter cities work as Romer suggests, and help developing nations climb out of the poverty pit? I have no idea… and I guess the only way we’ll find out is if someone lets him build one.

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Prosthetics porn

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Hans Husklepp - Immaculate Arm prosthetic design conceptThere is an arc of progress with human technologies: first comes functionality, then gradual acceptance, and then the aesthetic overhaul. The transition from practicality to personality has always interested me, because it hinges on that point of acceptance, be it grudging or enthusiastic; only then do notions of art start to appear and entwine themselves with functional objects.

Some objects achieve that point of acceptance more quickly than others; these are usually the objects of power, objects that make someone more than human – swords and cars, for example. Slower to achieve acceptance and freedom from stigma are those objects designed to raise the disadvantaged to the same status as everyone else.

We appear to be on that cusp of acceptance with human prosthetics. Granted, there have probably been carved crutches, peg-legs and walking sticks for millennia, but they were only ever crude stand-ins (if you’ll excuse the pun) for a damaged or missing limb. But they represented a refusal to be stigmatised, a defiant embracing of the user’s condition – “This is me; this is my replacement limb. Deal with it.”

Now we can build prosthetic legs that are in some respects superior to the originals, and it surely won’t be long before artificial arms that can replicate (or exceed) the essential functions of their biological equivalents become available to the widening sphere of those who can afford them – and that defiance, that rejection of stigma, will become more prevalent. It’s a stage of great interest to transhumanist thinkers, naturally, but it’s also attracting the eyes of artists and designers who’ve noticed a new human space to colonise with the communication of ideas.

There’s a gallery of cybernetic design concepts – like Hans Huseklepp’s Immaculate Arm, pictured top right – and photo-portraiture over at New Scientist at the moment which will get you thinking about this sort of stuff (it’s what inspired the preceding paragraphs of waffle from me, at any rate), but consider it only a starting point. Sit back for five minutes and think about the ways we already customise the human body for aesthetic effect; then imagine what we’ll start doing when prosthetics are affordable and effective enough to become ubiquitous. It’s closer than you think. [image copyright Hans Huseklepp, reproduced here under Fair Use terms; please contact for take-down if required]

Here’s your starter for ten: when will we first hear of people choosing to replace undamaged natural limbs with prosthetics, be it for practical or artistic reasons? How will the general public react to that? How would you feel if your teenaged son came home with a cybernetic hand in place of the perfectly functional one he had before?

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The Troll Crusade: Anonymous, Scientology and all that

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Anonymous - they are legion.To paraphrase the lovely Pat Cadigan, reality is always weirder than fiction… because fiction is constrained by the need to appear plausible. Which is why, had someone tried to write a novel about an ad-hoc tribe of sociopaths united by membership of an internet bulletin board attempting to take down a notoriously weird young religion created by a fast-talking science fiction writer that numbers some of the biggest names in Hollywood among its ranks, they’d have probably been laughed out of the slush pile with a form rejection slip. [image by Sklathill]

But Chanology, the Anonymous crusade against Scientology, is a very true story, and one that’s still being told. Julian Dibbell has a good long-form piece in Wired all about it, and it’s a fascinating read… not to mention ideal source-material for writers of near-future speculative fiction. Dibbell highlights the real driving motive behind the fluid alliance of Anonymous, which is much less the desire to right wrongs than it is the desire to wind up a legendarily uptight organisation – a desire that focusses inward as well as outward, like an irascible hydra whose heads turn on one another as often as they strike at their enemies.

Dibbell also points out that while Anonynous may represent the arrival of “the kind of ad hoc, loosely coupled social activism that many have hoped the ad hoc, loosely coupled architecture of the Internet would engender,” it may also represent its apogee. Anonymous and Scientology are almost made for one another, so perfectly diametrically opposed at an ideological level that they can’t help but feed the flames of the conflict; potential future opponents may well learn from Scientology’s mistake, and avoid feeding the trolls.

What interests me most about Anonymous as an amorphous (id)entity, though, is the potential it has for temporal continuity independent of its current membership. It’s a banner that any rebellious or angry group could raise at any point in the future, because although its methods and aims are fundamentally individualistic, its public face is exactly the opposite. Like the Luddites and the saboteurs before them, all that’s needed to join the cause is an awareness of its existence… and of its power to enrage the forces of order. Even if Chanology fizzles out against the superior legal firepower of Scientology, I suspect we’ll not have heard the last of Anonymous.

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DIY junk lathe

building a DIY latheThere are some mighty resourceful and inventive people out there, and arguably the best thing about the intermatubes (at least in my humble opinion) is that it’s easier than ever before to learn from them. Example: say you wanted a lathe, so as to teach yourself woodturning or some such similar craft. Now, lathes are pretty pricey pieces of hardware, even if you find one second hand – so why not just build one from scratch using readily available junk? [image from Instructables]

Time is money, as the old saying goes, but it seems to me that time is becoming more valuable than money, at least for those of us in the West – in that, if you’ve got the time and the motivation, you can build yourself affordable versions of technologies that would otherwise be way out of your reach. Mash that up with the rise of garage fabbing enterprises, and you’ve got the potential for a very different form of post-industrial economy on the horizon.