Category Archives: Blog

Blog

McLurkin and the Robot Swarm

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McLurkin swarm robotNo, it’s not the title of a new YA science fiction novel. James McLurkin is a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which has to be one of the most awesome jobs I can think of.

He’s interested in swarm robots (which we’ve mentioned here on Futurismic before, sometimes in a military context), and believes that the future of robotic development is modular, because it allows researchers to design and develop complex robots quickly and cheaply.

Chris Kiick of Hack-a-Day went to see a demonstration of McLurkin’s swarm robots, of which I am quite jealous. Apparently McLurkin has over a hundred of these things, though he only takes about a dozen out for shows to do tricks like “circle-the-wagons” and physical bubble-sorts. Even so, my inner geek suspects it’d still whip the hell out of a night at the comedy club.

You can find out more about McLurkin’s research at his own MIT website; there’s plenty of video of his swarm in action, also.

Blog

Making the Wiimote obsolescent – massive multi-touch Missile Command

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Did you ever play Missile Command in the arcades when you were a kid? I’ll bet you thought (more than once) “man, how awesome would it be if you could just touch the screen instead of using that trackball!”

Steve Mason evidently thought so, and has taken advantage of multi-touch technology to make a wall-sized version for the serious win:

I know we don’t do many gadget posts at Futurismic these days, but I couldn’t let that one pass by. 🙂 [vid via Engadget]

Blog

Carpet-bombing in cyberspace – the case for a military botnet

Bombs in an aircraft bomb-bayMore botnet news, this time in the form of military fist-shaking bluster! Here’s an article [via SlashDot] in the Armed Forces Journal that suggests the US military apparatus should build its own botnet for “the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace”:

“The time for fortresses on the Internet also has passed, even though America has not recognized it. Now, the only consequence for an adversary who intrudes into or attacks our networks is to get kicked out — if we can find him and if he has not installed a hidden back door. That is not enough. America must have a powerful, flexible deterrent that can reach far outside our fortresses and strike the enemy while he is still on the move.”

If I’m not very much mistaken, Colonel Williamson has only partially grasped the whole “internet as a non-locational space” thing.

“As much as some think the information age is revolutionary, local networks and the Internet are conceptually similar to the ancient model of roads and towns: Things are produced in one place and moved to another place where they have more value.”

Well, yes – things are produced in one place, sometimes (er, crowdsourcing?). But with the web, that thing can then be everywhere, all at once. Data is an infinite good. Colonel Williamson’s talk about roads-and-towns and “states competing against one another” goes a long way toward suggesting why traditional military organisations have struggled to combat terrorism – they simply don’t have a clue how it (or the internet) works.

But back to the carpet-bomb botnet – Colonel Williamson says that “[t]he U.S. would not, and need not, infect unwitting computers as zombies.” Instead, he thinks it best that the power be built up legitmately – which, again, kind of misses the point of a botnet, in that they’re designed to leverage an amount of hardware that would be financially impractical to buy, build and maintain. [image by TailspinT]

Here’s a better idea – how about a kind of “Milnet@home” project? Show your love and pride in your nation by letting it use some of your spare cycles for smiting the enemy! Come on – you’d trust Uncle Sam with your computer, wouldn’t you?

Blog

Crime stats as sculpture – Mount Fear

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Another little gem spotted by the grinders: what would you get if you took the crime incident statistics for London and represented them as a 3D physical map?

Mount Fear - installation sculpture based on crime statistics

Mount Fear is what you’d get. In the words of its creator, Abigail Reynolds:

The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain … The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it.

While it makes for an intriguing art project, Mount Fear surely presages a short-range extrapolation of geolocative mash-ups.

In other words, being able to call up the data used for Mount Fear and overlay it on Google Maps running on your mobile device would make your next flat- or apartment-hunting experience that little bit more reassuring.

Or should that be less reassuring?

Blog

We have to eat them in order to save them

Sable antelopeNothing kick-starts my Monday like some over-the-top provocative contrarian thinking. So, how fortunate to come across this report on conservation scientist Paul Nabhan, who suggests that the best thing we could do to prevent rare species going extinct is to start eating them.

First thing to note is that he’s not talking about snow leopards or pandas or anything like that. He’s talking about what he calls “heritage foods” – animals and plants that were once staples of regional diets but which have fallen out of favour in the kitchen, and are near to extinction as a result. [image by Arno & Louise]

Second thing to note is that Nabhan has a new book on the market.

Now, while Nabhan’s point is interesting in its own right, I find myself more interested in the results of the rhetorical approach. Look at the MetaFilter comments thread about this article, and see how many of the commenters have simply extrapolated the worst possible scenario from the headline without bothering to read the article. Is it worth using contrarian tactics to stimulate debate, or is it just another way of making a noise about a new product?