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September 2010 is Cyborg Month

Remember me mentioning the 50th anniversary of the word “cyborg” the other day? Well, here’s how I knew that: it’s thanks to Tim “Quiet Babylon” Maly*, who has decided that this particular neologism needs celebrating. And so, September 2010 is Cyborg Month, which will see fifty posts (mostly essays, but possibly all sorts of other webby content) from a wide selection of clever and interesting people (including, presumably in the name of making up the numbers a little bit, yours truly) about cyborgs, to be collected on a just-for-purpose Tumblr blog.

If you’re thinking “posts about cyborgs” is a little vague, I am assured that the vagueness is quite deliberate: “cyborg” is a fuzzy and much-misused term, and I think Tim’s basically trying to capture its multiple meanings and manifestations (and, indeed, manifestos) as they stand at this point in its chequered yet meteoric history. I’m very flattered to be taking part: I’ve seen who some of the other contributors are, and I think I’m very safe in saying that if you enjoy the various articles and waffle-topics I post about here at Futurismic, you’re definitely going to want to bookmark or subscribe to that Tumblr feed. Serious brainfood coming down the pipe, yes sir.

[ * Yes, yes, I know. Tim Maly will, I very much hope, be contributing (as promised by myself long ago) here at Futurismic in some capacity, at some point in the near future when he’s a little less busy**. And y’all can blame that contributory absence on me for being too quick to announce the contribution, rather than on Tim for not contributing, OK? OK. ]

[ ** I always sympathise with busy people. I sometimes like to think I’m a busy person, but then I look at how much stuff really busy people get done, and realise that I’m actually just a disorganised person with aspirations to busyness. Which is better than nothing, I guess. ]

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William Gibson: Google isn’t a panopticon

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The New York Times turns the mic over to William Gibson, who ponders Google’s place in the world (or, perhaps more appropriately, our place in Google’s world):

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

Note to self – I’m still enough of a vain little fanboy that I’m hugely gratified when my heroes think  similar things to myself, in this case regarding Eric Schmidt’s unGooglable childhood idea:

… I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.

The genie won’t go back into the bottle, folks.

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Thorium: the new nuclear?

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Via NextBigFuture, the UK’s foremost conservative middle-class broadsheet hopes President Obama can leapfrog red tape and stop the momentum of the fossil fuel industry dead in its tracks (without any explosive dissipation of said momentum, one assumes) by rushing through research on thorium-based nuclear reactors:

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

“There are (obviously!) no magic bullets, but this might just be a magic bullet.” Riiiight. Nonetheless, onwards:

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

OK, sounding reassuring so far. So why haven’t we been doing anything with this before?

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. “They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology,” he said.

Those dastardly French! I might have known! Where’s Churchill now we need him most blahblahblahlingeringcryptoracismandEuropanic…

And now, having revved up the patriotic emotions and ecological consumer-guilt of the reader, here’s the venture capital pitch:

The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for the thorium fuel-cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator at its UK operation.

Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.

Yeah, I know, I’m being snarky… reading The Telegraph just has that effect on me, I’m afraid. But beneath the coded writing is a story we’ve covered before: thorium really is (at least in theory) cheaper and safer than all the other nuclear fission options, and much less sci-fi-pie-sky than fusion. But as pointed out above, someone needs to invest big money (and/or big political backing) to get it working and viable.

So, The Telegraph gamely suggests Mr Obama kick-start a modern-day Manhattan Project to that end… forgetting, perhaps, that the impetus for the Manhattan Project was somewhat more pressing and politically expedient than the abstract and contentious doom du jour of Peak Hydrocarbon, that there weren’t massive entrenched business interests lobbying and obfuscating against it, and that America as a nation actually had a few cents to rub together at the time.

Though, to their credit, they do invite the US to team up with China to get the job done. The Telegraph staff and readership will doubtless cheer on from the sidelines; if that’s not enough to get things moving, well, I don’t know what is.

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Project recreates Ray Bradbury’s Happylife Home

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Poor old Ray Bradbury: constantly pestered for soundbites by lazy journalists exploiting his oldster’s dislike of the internet (big name + dissenting opinion = linkbait!), and lampooned (or is it celebrated?) in a cuss-laden viral video [NSFW, natch]. This isn’t the future he imagined at all.

At least, not completely. FlowingData points us toward a conceptual project inspired in part by Bradbury’s story “The Veldt”; the Happylife Home analyses the moods and emotions of its occupants and feeds back that data in non-verbal visual forms. As always with such projects, the abstracts and explanations are part of the fun (at least for me):

In the context of national security, criminal activity and human safety, technology is usually seen as a means to an end; however dark or invasive the application, its presence is accepted because the worst case scenario would be infinitely worse. Thus, through these means ‘smart’ technologies are entering our lives and being applied as infallible judges and experts of human character and state.

But with a slight shift in context: applying their powers in the domestic setting, the political justifications are removed allowing us to freely explore these technologies for what they are.

Erm, sure. OK. So what’s the box on the wall do?

We built a visual display linked to the thermal image camera. This employs facial recognition to differentiate between members of the family. Each member has one rotary dial and one RGB LED display effectively acting like emotional barometers. These show current state and predicted state, the predicted state being based on years of accumulated statistical data.

There is no written feedback on emotional state, it is left to the viewer to interpret this final position of the dial: ‘Is it where it was this morning?’ ‘Why has it spun so far round?’

An interesting project, but not one I think I’d want in my home – it’d just add a whole new level of meta-anxiety on top of all the other stressors of life, surely?* Unless the idea is to build a sort of aesthetically abstract form of biofeedback therapy…

[ * Yes, I’m the sort of person who can find themselves worrying about how much or how little worrying I’ve been doing. Never a dull moment, I tell you. ]

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The emperor’s new threads

New Scientist has a brief report on a team working toward making metamaterial threads that would be functionally invisible:

… fabricating metamaterials using components small enough to manipulate the sub-micrometre wavelengths of visible light is no mean feat. To avoid that problem, Tuniz’s colleagues Boris Kuhlmey, Simon Fleming and Maryanne Large have suggested an elegant way to shrink a larger metamaterial-like structure down to a size capable of controlling visible light: assemble standard glass rods and metal tubes into a cylinder, heat the assembly until it softens, and draw it into a long thin fibre. The process preserves the shapes of internal structures, but shrinks them down to the nanoscale needed to control visible light, and the resultant metamaterial is in the form of a thread that is thin enough to be flexible, like an optical fibre. So far, Tuniz and colleagues have produced 10-micrometre-thick threads.

Now, the researchers have used a computer model to design an invisible version of their thread. To achieve that, the thread must be just 1 micrometre thick – the metamaterial absorbs some light and so would appear dark if it was any thicker. Their calculations suggest that the thread would be invisible if seen from the side – rather than end on – in polarised light.

No promises of invisibility cloaks yet, sadly. But you never know…

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