Category Archives: Blog

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Open-source self-replicating machine, er, self-replicates

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Self-replicating machines, as a concept, have been around since mathematician John von Neumann thought them up. But there has never been a working non-organic machine that has been able to construct a fully-functional working clone of itself … until now. [story via pretty much everywhere; image from the RepRap homepage]

“RepRap achieved self-replication at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK.”

RepRap - self-replicating machine

I’ve linked to the RepRap Project before when I first started blogging here at Futurismic, and so I’m immensely pleased to see they’ve reached this major milestone. And the head-twistingly awesome bit about it is that, as RepRap is 100% open-source, you can just download a parts list and make your own, then set it to make copies of itself to give to your friends.

“The machine that [self-replicated] – RepRap Version 1.0 “Darwin” – can be built now – see the Make RepRap Darwin link, and for ways to get the bits and pieces you need, see the Obtaining Parts link.”

OK, so it looks clunky, and it lacks the conceptual elegance of Drexler’s engines of creation, but think of it as a proof of concept. Imagine that RepRap could build a functional replica of itself at half the size, and that then the replica could replicate to half the size again, and so on. Unless you’re worried about the largely improbable “grey goo” scenario, it’s possible that we’ll look back on RepRap as the dawn of a new age for the means of production …

… or the root cause of global unemployment, maybe. 😉

Blog

Got Change for an Electron?

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Ella at the whiteboardIsraeli scientists have sliced electrons into “quasiparticles,” each with a quarter charge of the electron.

Although electrons are indivisible, if they are confined to a two-dimensional layer inside a semiconductor, chilled down to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero and exposed to a strong magnetic field that is perpendicular to the layer, they effectively behave as independent particles, called quasiparticles, with charges smaller than that of an electron.

Quasis have been known for 20 years, but they were “odd fractionally charged” — one third of an electron, one fifth, etc. The quarter-charges behave differently and may be useful for computing.

Those of us who have trouble wrapping our heads around quantum stuff might sympathize with astronomers, who, the New York Times tells us, are finding cosmology just as puzzling.

As far as astronomers can tell, there is no relation between dark matter, the particles, and dark energy other than the name, but you never know.

Nevertheless, string theorist Brian Greene, promoting the World Science Festival, reminds us of something most readers of this site would probably find a truism, but is probably a new idea to a lot of people:

We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living.

[Ella Delivers Her Lecture on String Theory by Phillip C]

Blog

Algorithms to reveal secrets of East Germany

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In Spring 2006, I spent a week in Berlin with some friends from university. As part of a city tour highlighting the Berlin’s Cold War heritage, the guide made a passing reference to plans for the digital reconstruction of files shredded by East German secret police.

As this project entered its pilot stage in May 2007, Germany’s Spiegel Online reported on the finer details;

[W]ith the looming collapse of the Communist regime becoming increasingly evident [in 1989], agents of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst … feverishly plowed millions of active files through paper shredders, or just tore them up by hand.

Rights activists interrupted the project and rescued a total of 16,250 garbage bags full of scraps. But rescuing the history on those sheets of paper amounted to an absurdly difficult jigsaw puzzle. By 2000, no more than 323 sacks were legible again — reconstructed by a team of 15 people working in Nuremburg — leaving 15,927 to go. So the German government promised money to any group that could plausibly deal with the remaining tons of paper.

The Fraunhofer Institute won the contract in 2003 … Four hundred sacks of scraps will be scanned, front and back, and newly-refined software will try to arrange the digitized fragments according to shape, texture, ink color, handwriting style and recognizable official stamps.

This week, as the pilot phase of the project reached completion, the BBC’s radio programme Digital Planet picked up on the story;

“It will be a long job – but that’s the interesting part,” said the Fraunhofer’s Jan Schneider.

“First we have to digitise all the pieces from the bags. This is done by a special high-speed scanning device.

“The next step is to segment the image itself from the raw scan – we need the outline of the pieces, pixel-wise, to perform the reconstruction process after that.

“Then all digitised pieces of paper are stored in the database. After that we reconstruct a lot of the descriptive features of the pieces.”

However, at the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen, the main place political prisoners were held and subjected to torture, there are criticisms that the process has already taken too long.

“I think it comes a little bit late,” said Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the site, which is also a museum.

“Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Wall we start to reconstruct these Stasi files, which are really important: the most important files were the ones they destroyed.

“I am happy that now it is going forward, but it is late.”

[2nd story via the BBC]

Blog

Frikkin’ LASERs

Another wonderful development in the world of LIDAR – LIght Detection And Ranging – has lead to the possibility of mapping the surface and geophysical properties of other planets with with “differences [in height] down to one centimeter“. Pixel resolution has also greatly increased, “from kilometers square to a few feet by a few feet.”

LIDAR works on a similar principle to radar, but through the use of lasers rather than radio waves. The laser is shot at an object, and the time delay between the pulse and the reflection is measured in order to accurately gauge the distance. The advantages of LIDAR over radar are twofold: LIDAR can be used to measure smaller objects, and it works on a greater variety of materials.

Of course project leader Professor Donald Figer is keen to promote his system’s anti-terrorism credentials:cctv

“Imagine,” he says, “that you have this 3-D, 180-degree fish-eye system . . . in every city scanning continuously for biohazards.”

I know it’s meant to be scanning for biohazards, but presumably the system could also be used to create real-time, centimetre-resolution maps of cities, including the relative positions of every individual. Combine this with currently existing surveillance systems and we could have ourselves a nice panopticon by the middle of the century.

[original story from Technology Review][image by Mike Licht]

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Singularity season – nerd rapture or inconvenient truth?

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array of computer screensNothing divides opinion like the future – it’s human nature, we all love to take a stab at predicting what will come. But it’s also human nature to disagree over what cannot yet be proven (which is something we can be sure of by looking at the past).

So, Vernor Vinge – the computer scientist and sf novelist who coined the term ‘Technological Singularity’ as used in this context during a presentation back in the eighties, and has talked about it ever since in his fiction and elsewhere – provides the capstone article to a special Singularity edition of IEEE Spectrum, defending the concept against the criticisms levelled at it by various scientists, economists and philosophers.

“The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?” is probably “Yes, but only briefly.””

For some odd reason IEEE neglected to solicit Warren Ellis‘s opinion, so he supplied it himself:

“When you read these essays and interviews, every time you see the word “Singularity,” I want you to replace it in your head with the term “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”“

As always, if you want the apogee of cynicism, Ellis is your man; he’s the bucket of cold water thrown over the mating dogs of enthusiasm.

But other opinions are available, as the adverts say – George Dvorsky’s response to Ellis, for example:

“The day is coming, my friends, when Singularity denial will seem as outrageous and irresponsible as the denial of anthropogenic global warming. And I think the comparison is fair; environmentalists are often chastised for their “religious-like” convictions and concern. It’s easy to mock the Chicken Littles of the world.”

What do Futurismic‘s readership think about the Singularity – awesome sf-nal literary metaphor, or looming technological likelihood? [image by binary koala]