Catering to the future shocked meatheads in the pre-singularity wasteland

Cool keyboard

Drake — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 23:57:53 GMT

If you program java, or c++ you know how tedious typing the same thing over and over again can be. While this is being marketed to gamers, and the application is obvious there, the "Every key can execute one command or a string of commands." A string of commands can be anything from "ctrl+c alt+tab ctrl+v" or "system.printf" so not only is this cool for the WoW gamer who needs 15 bars on his screen, this is also cool for the programming or heavily mediated. Saving pictures? Right click, hit button, hits the save key, puts in a directory, hits enter. The possibilities are endless. I know I'm getting one.

Printable Solar Cells

Drake — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:38:17 GMT

Drake here with some more rubbish content for the girls and boys who avoid reading my blag.

"Konarka Technologies is a company which is trying to develop new ways of producing solar energy, with its headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts and it was founded in 2001. On 4th of March they announced that they have successfully tested the manufacturing process of inkjet printed solar cells. This project was published in a journal called “Advanced Materials” entitled “High Photovoltaic Performance of Inkjet Printed Polymer:Fullerene Blends” and it was developed by a Konarka team consisting of Dr. Stelios A. Choulis, Claudia N. Hoth, Dr. Pavel Schilinsky and Dr. Christoph J. Brabec.

According to Rick Hess, president and CEO at Konarka, this a big step for more efficient solar cells and here are a few of his words: “demonstrating the use of inkjet printing technology as a fabrication tool for highly efficient solar cells and sensors with small area requirements is a major milestone”, also he said: “this essential breakthrough in the field of printed solar cells positions Konarka as an emerging leader in printed photovoltaics”.

Inkjet printing can be used anytime, anywhere because it’s compatible with various materials and substances, and it’s an easy-to-use technique." I saw it here.

This is cool.

What would be really cool.... IS when I can buy one of these cartridges and stick it in my inkjet printer. Imagine printing out a solar panel anytime a project needed it, and just clipping some alligator clips on for power. Or if it's cheap enough just running them out for poor people. Laminating them and covering your boat for under 100 bucks. Similar to that other company that focused on producing the stuff. Nanosolar if memory servers correctly. They had the right idea all along, focus on the manufacturing to get the cost down, not some magical new method of producing solar power. Oh well. This is another manufacturing focused project that will be really cool for hobbyists.

Nanobots and Anti-Senescence

Drake — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 21:04:33 GMT

So, you want to live forever.

Other than carbon copying and gene hacking, what choices do you have?

Well, nanobots of course. Everyone goes on about how cool they are, but what do you do when they go haywire? Usually people think you would turn into a gray goop, but we havn't quite reached the testing stage on that one. Most likely whats going to happen is you will have some error copied millions of times, causing cancer, brain damage, etc until the bug is ironed out. What else... nano bots are tiny, and assumed to be pretty intelligent at that point. But how much intelligence can you really fit in something a few molecules across? Much more likely the intelligence would be distributed, or maybe one of your implants would carry a cnc. Who knows yet.

The real point is, what do you do when they mutate? I have not really seen anything about mutation control. The strategies I can think of off the top of my noodle are....

1) Recognition, the nanobot uses its 'selfimage' to determine if another nanobot is the same as it, if it isn't it enlists other nanobots to destroy it. Problem? If one nanobot is capable of building a complete copy of itself, then maybe the mutation graygoos you.

2) Make the nanobots three 'sexes.' Or more. This would require them to come together to reproduce. The nanobots could poll their distributed consciousness and determine what types are needed in what amounts and reproduce accordingly, any errors are ironed out on contact.

3) Don't let them self replicate, meticulously test/scan new ones to prevent problems

4) Let them die, make their battery sources finite and irreplaceable. Make the chemicals recyclable so they body uses them, or they are completely reused.

5) Don't make them too intelligent.

Before we start letting nanobots float around in our blood streams, we should have well defined control strategies in place to prevent them from gray gooing the populace.

Entropy and the transhuman

Drake — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 22:56:26 GMT

In the transhumanist system, ie a transhuman's body, there are many more opportunities for the creation of statistically pure entropy. Many of the body's systems can be tapped for the chemical nature of their various exchanges. The collection of waste in the gastrointestinal system, movement of lymph, fluctuating core temperature, degrees of motion, amount of neural leakage, the list of sources in the chaotic system that is the human body goes on for pages, and one would only need to interview a doctor for more information. So, when paired with a post or transhuman bioelectronical systems would provide a large amount of entropy for encrypted systems.

Operating System that is Inadvertently Optimized for SSD

Drake — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:35:56 GMT

Now, I am a total and complete stumbleupon addict. No jokes, no lies. So, I was stumbling the today and came across Puppy Linux. Now, on the surface its nothing special. Just another live OS similar to what every major distribution is publishing to win over the swing os users, "Hey just try our OS for like 5 minutes, you dont even have to install, just burn this cd and be amazed." You know, because being free just doesn't cut it, you have to be free, do everything they need, and give great head just to get someone to use your awesome software. (Something isn't useful unless you pay for it, right KGB?)

Moving on.

Puppy Linux is pretty cool because at boot time you decide which program modules are going to be loaded onto the ramdisk the whole OS runs off of the entire time you use it. It minimizes any disk usage to read/writing working files. Bingo, exactly what you need to maximize the lifetime of your SSD.

Why is this important?

Well, solid state disks are the future of computing, no arguments from anyone, anywhere. Less power, no moving parts, smaller footprint for more room... in 3 - 5 years. The rub is that the hardware has limited write cycles, and for power users this can be a huge problem. Though the writes are rated at millions to tens of millions, spread out across your hardware, when you get a terabyte chip embedded in your arm, you don't want it wearing out in five years. Personally I'd want a large amount of volatile ram that doesn't have these encroaching write errors doing most of the work.

But really, in 5 years I bet we won't even be worrying about that.

DnD

Drake — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 10:23:26 GMT

I Am A: True Neutral Human Sorcerer (4th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-13
Dexterity-16
Constitution-16
Intelligence-17
Wisdom-13
Charisma-13

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Economics of Scarcity

Drake — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:06:11 GMT

So, again I was just browsing the interweb, and came across a site that has an interesting take on things, but completely ignores the potential for technological advancement and attempts to solve the problems of fifty years from now in terms of today. Seven Revolutions just outlines what problems we're going to face. The solutions? Wait, I said something about solutions. Oh, "Pay Us." Okay, my first sentence lied. Well, still, we live in exponential times, with the amount of new technical material being double at a rate of once every 18 months, up from something like once every 10 years a decade of go, and projected to be once a week in less than a decade, nanotech right around the corner, more MiPS in computers than people in 15, longer lifespans in 20, bah why think so narrowly.

Terabyte Thumb Drives Made Possible by Nanotech Memory

Drake — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:32:14 GMT

Okay, so I was reading this article, or one similar to it, I don't remember this was a couple nights ago. Anyways, so I was reading an article similar to that one and the only thing I could really imagine was embeddable storage. Thats a lot of information to store in something the size of your thumb. If I could have a wireless accessible implant that stored 100, 200 gigabytes embedded in my arm (at a reasonable price) I'm pretty sure I would go ahead and do it. There are dozens of ways to power the thing, a few protocols for accessing it, and bam, storage you never forget. Better yet, get 2, or 4, or a dozen spread out about your body operating on a trickle charge from your nervous system, your body heat, etc, all interconnected over a PAN, connected to your 7G phone black boxing every aspect of your life for posterity while streaming 900 years of music into your sub-dermal stapes stimulator.