Pro Liberi

All long long time ago in a galax….   Wait.  I exaggerate.   A long time ago anyway I was part of a project that simply fired a light into your eye and displayed on your retina a simple image from a computer monitor.   This image floated in front of you and you could read it easily whilst seeing the world around you.   Similar to a heads up display on the car.    I’ve waited a long time for a practical application to come along and now one has it is nothing like I expected.

Read this article about NEC’s translation retinal glasses.   The display is part of a computing unit that listens to someone talking and displays what they are saying in your language.   It will be very nice when it is ready for real use.  I could use one of those when I am up in Glasgow next.

Even though the translation unit is not ready for the real world yet the application I was expecting is already part of the unit.   Simply a display of manuals whilst you look at the real thing.   Imagine looking inside your PC while you install a new component with this system showing a step by step guide in the retinal display for you to copy.   It will revolutionise education and allow repairs and building by unskilled people on almost everything.

Sadly, instead of making the unit for sale individually.   NEC have chosen to sell it as a classroom tool where a single teacher can display what he wishes to show and records what the others do.    The unit comes in at a hefty $8.2M for a 30 seat set up.    Hardly affordable.   I guess I’ll scratch it off my XMas list for this year.

Can’t wait to see what the other electronic manufacturers do with this technology.   I wonder if this could make the eBooks readers obsolete?   Sat Nav whilst driving, heads up displays for cars, bikes.   I/F for PDA’s, MP4 players, phones.   There are a lot of applications out there waiting for an affordable retina display.  I wonder if NEC may have lost a trick here by not going for the mass market.

I’ll be keeping my eye out for one of these.

Sometimes you just keep on using low technology equipment because it is not worth changing.

A tea pot is one such device. However the age old problem of the spout dribbling all over the place has finally been dealt with. Read the full triumphant story here.

Now not to pop anyone’s balloon but someone had told me why this happened a long time ago. I thought it just wasn’t worth the hassle of engineering a solution that could be retrofitted or replacing the teapots and that new teapots would have this super dooper new spout built in. In the meantime the servants need to be sent back for some NVQs. The PM should get on this straight away.

But now the final solution has finally arrived and finally I can have my cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches without the stress of dripping tea all over the place. The world is saved.

Looking at ways to improve driver safety on the roads some scientists are looking at a way for drivers to see through walls. Sadly it’s not using some super new visual device but instead using digital imagery from cameras mounted ahead of the vehicle being altered and displayed for the driver to view. Read the full details here.

Now I’ve been waiting for this technology for some time. It’s pretty much used in Sci-Fi films all the time and it doesn’t have any spectacular requirements to implement in its simplest form. That simple form being a display mounted in front of the user and a camera mounted at the front of the vehicle. The user can be in any position, facing backward, even lying on their back or, as we do with drones, not even be there. However, once you start looking at using cameras to see behind walls then you start down an area where you are forced to extrapolate the view and fill in missing bits with data that the camera can not see. Guesses as you like from previous views and knowledge. It’s not easy and I’m sure that they have hit a few challenges. Especially when the reason for the unit is safety. It has to be very careful about missing things that could come back and haunt them. For example the camera sees around the corner and sees a truck parked there. Out of the cameras view is a moving motorbike. The software extrapolates the view and fills in the blanks with, err, blanks because it doesn’t see the bike. The driver takes the corner feeling safe when suddenly the bike appears. Too late. Or maybe not as it depends on the speed of processing, scan rate and the reflexes of the driver. All this they will be looking at now.

However, I don’t see why we can’t use these sorts of systems now for other tasks. Such as bomb disposal, working on waste in a nuclear reactor, deep sea diving etc. All things that could benefit from this and all areas we currently use mass produced carbon units for. We just need to amalgamate technology like the cameras with robotic bodies instead of car bodies and we are away.

Back to vehicles though. Imagine how many women bikers would be saved if the driver in a lorry had an unobstructed view 360 degrees around his vehicle just by turning his head inside his cab. We can do this now with the technology we have so why haven’t we?

Doesn’t make sense to me why this type of technology is not in more widespread use now. It seems only the military use this technology for any real use. I suspect it is a funding issue. Yet here we are funding stage two. I smell politics somewhere.

The sun is the source of all our power and despite what is said none of it is renewable.  It is just perception based on our limited life span.    We know several ways of getting this power from the sun, some practical and some not.      It is a clean, virtually inexhaustible supply of power and enough to last us for the lifetime of our planet.    Regardless as to whether we are on it or not.

One way being looked at now is solar thermal.    Unlike solar panels it needs the direct rays of the sun on it to create the heat necessary to be turned into power.   Solar panels produce a trickle of power even if the sky is overcast and in winter.  Solar thermal however does not and so it has to be generated in a country with lots of sun.   You can use solar yourself for cooking using instructions here now.   The only difference is the heat is applied to the food in one case and to power generating equipment in the other.

Deserts are ideal for power generation and there are a lot of them on this planet.
(Click to enlarge)

The largest tropical desert is the Sahara in North Africa and that is where it is suggested we get Europe’s power from in this article.   As you can see from the map above Europe doesn’t have any deserts but it is very close to one of the worlds largest, the Sahara.   Only an inch or so on the map but that equates to thousands of miles in a massive expensive new electrical grid.

Personally, I would be a bit apprehensive about having our power supplied from an area outside our control.    Never mind being carried through areas that want to control us.   At least the US can do it’s power generation in the Mojave desert within it’s borders.     It’s bad enough that our oil can be held to ransom but at least we can stockpile that until we mobilise for war negotiate.   North Africa and the rest of the deserts near us all seem to be where the people that don’t really like us that much are.

It’s still a good idea and we should explore it rather than tilting at windmills and eating our cats and dogs but we still need to generate a plan that covers our energy needs with some to spare over the next 50 years and until we can get Fusion or something similar going.  Let’s look at capturing the sun in space, a vast desert, and transmitting it to Earth.  It would be secure and totally within our control.

Of course our government will have spent all it’s money on windmills before we get this up and running.   Just have to hope on of our SAS units can slip over to France and plug in an extension cable for us.

This article about a new 3D laptop by Acer sounds interesting.

It uses glasses so it’s not perfect but they don’t, from the photograph, look like the usual 3D glasses you get with DVDs and when you go to 3D presentations.   Of course the picture is clearly doctored so they may not be the true glasses.

Now from the video, in the article, it appears that the 3D picture displayed is the same as the 3D pictures we normally see.   So it won’t be easily viewed without the glasses without significant practise.  Basically this uses stereoscopy to produce the image.  Fooling our brains into seeing a 3D image from two specially coloured  and positioned images.  This causes unavoidable colour loss in the final output and is not a long term solution.

From the descriptions Acers one innovative step is its ability to convert what is displayed on to the screen into 3D without requiring the software itself to be 3D enabled.    I would guess that will make for some interesting viewing as the hardware performs this conversion.    Although if it works OK I can already think of a couple of applications where this would be useful such as CAD work.

The lack of colour however makes it more of a gimmick for most people.   3D is not going to be on everyone’s PC for a long time.   Specialist applications and games again.    Pity that.   Bring on holographs or colour 3D.

This virtual autopsy table looks like a superb tool for education.   Watch the video here to see what it can do.

Imagine being able to do that in biology classes.  Would save a few frogs I would think for starters plus major washing up after.    What we could learn about quickly, cleanly and with a lot less fuss.

Now imagine we do the same things with other items, see inside a nuclear reactor whilst it is on, a jet engine, watch explosions in a car engine and see how the shock wave grows and flows.  All things likely to get young minds working away.

Of course that is not what this is for.    Although I think I would like one that actually worked on alive body to help repair it rather than find out what went wrong.  From the description of how the data is generated it sounds like it could be used that way.    Perhaps next time we will have a Virtual Treatment Table to look at.    That would be a major step forward in medical treatments.

This gadget looks interesting.

An eBook reader for the modern age from Barnes and Noble.  It’s called the Nook.  The size looks OK and the controls look easy enough to use.  It does use DRM though although it does appear to be able to be used by your own documents which conform to the EPUB, PDB and PDF formats.   If it could manage HTML and straight TXT as well it would be great.

It looks like they are finally coming around to something that is usable although I think I’ll wait for the porn upgrade though. Full screen colour, more memory.   I suspect it will be called the Nook E.     Geddit?   Nookie….  Oh well.

Crystals have always been of interest to me for some reason. I see them being something more than what the look to be, just decoration with strange electrical activity.   So far we have not really found many uses for them besides using quartz crystals to keep time and make pretty light shows.

Now it appears that our science fiction stories may not be too far from the truth when they use crystals as storage devices.   This article talks about our hopes for man made crystals that can hold 100 times what we can store now on magnetic media.

Makes you wonder when we will have so much storage that we really won’t be able to store any more.    At this rate we will all have all the files on the internet in a crystal in the palm of our hand.

One thing I did find strange was the comment that ‘Many scientists regard making crystals as a black art, as the process of producing solid crystals from salt in solution is difficult to control.’   Personally I thought it was a process that was well defined and easily recreatable and much easier controlled than biological growth.  It is even in kit form for kids and adults who are kids,  err… adults teaching kids I mean).    Maybe all crystals are not made equal.