Blog

ReWalk exoskeleton video – marketing the future as the present

2 Comments

ReWalk is an Israeli-developed exoskeleton suit that gives paraplegics the ability to stand, walk – and even drive. This story has been floating around for a few days (including some typically tasteless Robocop comparisons from UK tabloid news outlets), but m1k3y at grinding.be posted the video and it looked so science fictional – that perfect balance between “wow, check it out” and no-big-deal workaday reality – that I thought it deserved a re-run here:

See what I mean about workaday? The whole atmosphere of the video is low-tech, almost mundane. Perhaps they’re playing down the technological angle for fear of attaching stigma, but it’s about as un-Robocop in style as you could imagine. What will promotional videos for the first commercially available brain-machine interfaces look like?

Blog

Fun science fact: We are all somewhat insane

wingnutA bold claim (or maybe not), but evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse thinks he can back it up.

[He] compares the human brain with race horses: Just as horse breeding has selected for long thin legs that increase speed but are prone to fracture, cognitive advances also increase fitness — to a point….

People with aggressive and narcissistic personalities are the easiest to understand evolutionarily; they look out for number one. But even if 16 million men today can trace their genes to Genghis Khan…very few potential despots achieve such heights. Perhaps to check selfish urges, in favor of more probable means to biological success, social lubricants such as empathy, guilt and mild anxiety arose….

But too much emotional acuity — when individuals overanalyze every grimace — can cause a motivational nervousness about one’s social value to morph into a relentless handicapping anxiety.

[Wingnut by Gibna Kebira]

Blog

Singularity watch: Vinge on the future

raptureThe New York Times has a brief, appreciative item about Vernor Vinge and his novel Rainbows End. Here’s a nice if-this-goes-on snip:

“These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” [Vinge] said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”

[Image: cloudsoup]

Blog

Where’s my jetpack? FUSIONMAN has it.

1 Comment

amazbuck jet pack“Where’s my jetpack?”

Three words to strike fear in the hearts of futurists and SFnal types everywhere. Fed into google, it returns 59,600 hits, including – aptly enough – this xkcd comic. A paleo-futuristic emblem of faded dreams and disappointment.

Now, finally, an answer – “!!FUSIONMAN!! has it.”

Last week, The Guardian reported on how FUSIONMAN (also known as Swiss aviator-inventor Yves Rossy) had been preparing for an attempted crossing of “the English Channel propelled by a jet-powered wing” with a number of test flights;

“Yves … jumped from a plane above the Swiss town of Bex and reached speeds of up to 180mph during his 12 minutes of jet-powered flight before landing at an airfield in Villeneuve. Rossy first unveiled his jet-powered wing in May with an 8-minute aerobatic display over the Alps.

“Everything went well, it was awesome,” said Rossy after the flight. “It’s my longest flight with this wing. If there are no technical problems, it’s OK for the English Channel. I can’t wait for this next challenge!”

His attempt had originally been thwarted by a collection of technical failures, including a leaking gas tank and two aborted flights during which the engines stopped within seconds of jumping from his support plane. He blamed these failures – which forced him to deploy his parachutes early – on “electronic interference problems”.

The successful flight involved him jumping out of the aircraft at 2,300m, flying horizontally under jet power from a height of 1,700m and then switching off the jet engines before deploying two parachutes at 1500m and 1200m.

The wing does not include moving parts such as flaps to control direction, but Rossy is able to steer by shifting his weight and moving his head.

When he reached the ground he still had 2 litres of fuel left in his wing, suggesting that he would have some margin for error during the cross-channel flight.”

The cross-channel attempt is scheduled for the 24th September (weather-permitting), and will be streamed live on the National Geographic Channel.

(image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Blog

Backing up languages

3 Comments

History may only just be beginning, but we already have a lot of data stashed away as a species, and as we know, it’s always good practice to back it up.

But if you’re thinking in terms of centuries or millennia, it might also be a good idea to record information about our languages so that future historians won’t have to contend with undecipherable writings, like Rongorongo, due to linguistic drift.

The Long Now Foundation has created a modern day Rosetta Stone to help solve this problem, here is a description from Kevin Kelly’s website:

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.

Kelly’s description of the project is fascinating, and it seems like a wonderful project, both in practical terms and in artistic terms.

[story via Slashdot]

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001