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GOCE lowly, lest ye fall

goce-copyEric Drexler writes about the beautiful Gravity and Steady State Ocean Explorer on his blog:

I’m glad to see that someone finally found an excuse to launch a streamlined spacecraft that will cruise above Earth, steadily firing its engines to keep it moving. (Aristotelian physicists take note.) The European Space Agency will soon launch this sleek piece of hardware on a mission of gravity measurement with unprecedented accuracy: The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) will carry accelerometers able to sense accelerations as little as 10–13 of what we tolerate on Earth.

Apparently because GOCE will orbit much lower than usual it needs to be streamlined to cope with the thin upper atmosphere and generate thrust to keep itself aloft.

Anyway it’s a very pretty piece of kit: surely the MacBook Air of spacecraft1.

[via Eric Drexler][image from ESA]

1: In that it’s solid-state and sleek.

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More alternative currency news: Monbiot on stamp scrip

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During the last decade, I could have counted the number of times I saw alternative currencies mentioned in a positive light on one hand and still had enough fingers free to flick the bird at the nearest futures trader.

But the last few months has seen them being mentioned all over the place – the latest being George Monbiot’s blog column at The Guardian, where he talks about the demurrage currencies – or “stamp scrip” – that enjoyed brief success in Europe during the inter-war recession.

Demurrage meant that the currency lost value the longer you held on to it:

The Austrian town of Wörgl also tried out Gessell’s idea, in 1932. Like most communities in Europe at the time, it suffered from mass unemployment and a shortage of money for public works. Instead of spending the town’s meagre funds on new works, the mayor put them on deposit as a guarantee for the stamp scrip he issued. By paying workers in the new currency, he paved the streets, restored the water system and built a bridge, new houses and a ski jump. Because they would soon lose their value, Wörgl’s own schillings circulated much faster than the official money, with the result that each unit of currency generated 12 to 14 times more employment.

It sounds like a crazy idea, but that may simply be because we’re so used to the system we’ve already got. And, as Monbiot points out, when our governments seem to think that the best solution to a financial crisis caused by ridiculous levels of lending is to encourage yet more ridiculous levels of lending, maybe the devil we know is best left behind this time round. [via Bruce Sterling]

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Pirates are underserved customers, says games executive

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A pirate, yesterdayThe gaming community is all a-flutter over some comments from Jason Holtman, the business development guy for games corporation Valve. [via TechDirt] The quote that’s got lips flapping is this one:

“There’s a big business feeling that there’s piracy,” he says. But the truth is: “Pirates are underserved customers.”

“When you think about it that way, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'”

Such a statement is naturally considered heresy by the gaming industry, which sees mammoth endemic piracy as eating away at its profit margins. Valve are well placed to understand digital distribution, though, thanks to their Steam service, and Holtman has evidently seen the writing on the wall as regards selling intangible products in tangible venues… perhaps he’s been learning from the mistakes of Hollywood and the record labels? [image by ioerror]

Whether piracy of digital content will ever be defeated remains an open question, of course (and seems unlikely), but it has been pointed out before that the most effective method of curbing the impact might be to minimise the reasons it happens – the biggest of which is surely the high prices. If every $80 game could be bought online for $10, would they sell eight times as many copies? How thin does that margin need to get before people stop taking the risks inherent in using cracked software?

And what ever happened to the flurry of interest in in-game advertising as a monetising strategy?

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Royal Navy gets PWNZ0R3D by virus

HMAS Adelaide auxiliary warshipRemember when I mentioned that the UK’s Royal Navy has been installing a Windows derivative on its warship and submarine control computers? [image by Serendigity]

Well, it’s a different set of hardware, but apparently a bunch of RN computers have been knocked out of action my an email-borne virus in recent weeks. There’s got to be a great opening for an open-source contractor with a clean security history over there right now… [via SlashDot]

More seriously, though, this highlights a very real risk to ‘traditional’ military forces. After all, if small territorial conflicts like the Gaza situation can go worldwide on the web, that suggests that any opponent worth deploying your navy against is at least going to try futzing with your computer systems… and if the combination of your installed operating systems and a lack of basic email security savvy means you can have warship systems out of action for a few days, there’s some opportunities for a really nasty David and Goliath scenario somewhere down the line.

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Are you ready for personalized genomics?

genome Personalized genomics–a rundown on your inherited risk for certain conditions–is becoming a reality.

A couple of hundred dollars, a few drops of saliva and a stamped envelope is all it takes to get a rundown on your inherited risk of around a hundred more-or-less common conditions, everything from bladder cancer and baldness to male infertility and memory loss. You can place your order by Internet with companies like 23andMe (“genetics just got personal”) and deCODEme (“deCODE your health”).

The cost of sequencing an entire individual genome is about $100,000 right now, and Pacific Biosciences in Menlo Park, California (“a revolution in DNA sequencing is coming”), says it will be able, by 2013, to map all three billion base-pairs of a person’s DNA in a quarter of an hour for a few hundred dollars.

Critics are not enthralled. Many diseases are the result of a complex interplay of many different genes that we’re just beginning to understand. And there is fear that people with dicey genomes could be discriminated against by employers, insurers and banks. (President George W. Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in the U.S. last year for that very reason.)

But here’s the real question: do you really want to know everything your genome could tell you? Is there any benefit in knowing you’re, say, 20 percent more likely to develop a fatal or debilitating disease? Might the worry about that possibility be almost as damaging to your quality of life as the disease itself?

What do you think?

As fast as the technology as advancing, you don’t have long to make up your mind.

(Via PhysOrg.)

(Image: U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science.)

[tags]genetics,DNA,ethics,medicine[/tags]

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