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I was quite interested to read about a giant airship to carry science back to the 1930s. In some ways a good idea. Many things were being developed and tried in the early 1900s. People were not tied down by restrictive government rules and regulations, well not in the West anyway, and many key areas were being explored and expanded.
One of the areas that was growing quickly was air travel. It was new and exciting. Not as we know now but using balloons instead. Zeppelins that was bigger than football fields but carried a few dozen at most were being developed until they all came crashing down, no pun intended, with the destruction of the Hindenburg. An entire field of aviation was consigned to the bin that day and even now we only use balloons for a few things even though even today they have several advantages over aircraft.
However, this article had little to do with going back to the 1930s as it is actually about using two of the airships advantages, a stable platform and low flight cost, as a science platform to house scientific instruments, a kind of poor mans satellite, to provide scientific research stations. Read the outline plan on using airships here.
I would like to think it could lead to us revisiting zeppelins as a viable form of transport as well as research platforms for scientific research. The benefits of them are still there and the major downside, ala Hindenburg, can be handled by new technology and new gases. The risk is significantly reduced. Sadly, the first thing you think of when you mention Zeppelins is them catching fire and crashing. Maybe they need a bit of good PR and somewhere they can be used successfully for local travel although I suspect for longer distances aircraft will win every time.
I liked the title of this publication ‘Darwinian spacecraft engine to last twice as long’ It envoked images that I thought would lead to a replacement for Viagra or something but sadly it was not to be.
What it was about was simply using computer algorithms to aid in the design of the next generation of Ion engines. Basically due to the way Ion engines work they wear out due to ions hitting the negative electrode and damaging it. Similar to filters eventually becoming glogged with debris but in the Ion engine the electodes cannot just be cleaned they must be replaced and as the system is hopefully many millions of miles away it isn’t too easy. One would think they could have a system that would just replace them built in but that appears not to be.
So an engineer developed an algorithm that continually tried different techniques to see what worked and what didn’t and thus increased the engine life from 2.8 years to 5.1 years in the simulator at least. A significant achievement. Coupled with my replacement theory, see above, they should now last for decades.
I wonder why then he linked his algorithm to Darwin. One with a theory on the evolution of life and the other with an algorithm that repeatably tries various design changes until it find the optimum settings. Is it because scientist develops new algorith is boring but scientist develops new darwinian algorith sounds cool. It got me having a look anyway and I’ve even passed it on so now he is that little bit more famous. Oh! So it worked then. Good idea.
The art of nanofoods. Sounds suitable high tech and it certainly is. It’s the science behind food that makes you feel full, saltier-tasting salt, less fattening fat, and to boost the nutritional value of everyday products and it’s working it’s way on to your menu soon. Read about the work being done here in the UK at the Institute of Food Research here.
It’s all good stuff they are talking about but I have one concern. One spoon of ice cream is going to make me feel full? It’ll be one rasher of bacon or one bite of chocolate soon. What is up with these guys? This stuff is what we live for. I don’t want to feel full after eating good stuff. I want a pill that makes me feel full that I can take when I’m faced with a plate of lettuce or tofu or something. I want ice cream I can eat as much as I want to and not get fat or, better, something non fattening and full of goodness that has ice cream flavouring that I like. I want to eat as much of the nice tasting foods as I can without ill effect. I can live with eating stuff thats good for you disguised as nice tasting stuff like bacon and chocolate but to have one spoon of it and then feel full. That would literally kill me as every time I was hungry I would have one bite of something and feel full. Starving myself to death but feeling full at the same time.
These guys may be on to something but they clearly are not thinking straight. They need to prioritise and get working on a pill to make you full first followed by some base inert nanofood that is good for you that picks up tastes from other food by osmosis or something. Leaving behind the bad for you bits while keeping the lip smacking tastes.
Instead, as these guys work directly for the government, we will have ice cream companies going out of business as a tub of ice cream lasts three years per household and these guys will move on to all our other puddings and sweets, the things that make living worthwhile. I think we may have to hunt them down and kill them. As soon as I’ve lost a bit of weight and can get up anyway.
Well it seems that the US has help an all electric bike race and it seems it went well. Read the story here.
Now the one thing I noticed was that the electric bikes developed for the race performed exceptionally well performance wise. OK. One strangely needed a reboot and a couple retired with problems but the two lead riders maintained a pace that was 18 seconds per lap off that set by conventional bikes. 18 seconds is a lot in a race but for the very first race I suspect we can expect to see significant improvements and that electric road bikes will be little different from the fuelled version soon enough.
With performance like this we can expect to see electric bikes rolled out pretty quickly to the streets and I wonder how our government will classify them. Each one theoretically will be eligible for learner bike riders. Should make the roads a bit more interesting as you won’t hear them coming at all and poor plod won’t have time to put down his donut and pick up his tax machine before they race around the corner and see him.
We have had relatively flexible media for a while now and I was hoping that some smart people would integrate it with a computer to give us the flexible displays we have been looking for. It can’t be too difficult to put a processor, video output and a WiFi link on a simple strip and allow us to browse web sites on it and for general viewing of text etc.
Now that will revolutionise the eBook market and cheaply too.
Of course while we are waiting for the integration the flexible displays are still being improved on. This next stage is now here where we can roll a working display up on a 4mm bar. This means that we could see roll up screen similar to roll up blinds being ‘rolled out’ OK. A bad pun but you get the idea. It should enable large walls to be rolled out with displays and then rolled up and removed when finished with. Theoretically this should replace everything where overhead projectors are currently used. Should be cheaper and less trouble too. It would also be handy at home where it would allow large TVs to be rolled out deployed as required and where suitable.
The next stage of course is panels that can be folded up. Then we can have newspapers and books that we can easy carry without concern. Displays that can be glued to walls. Then the future will be here.
For the moment though I would be just happy is someone actually produces the flexi pads so I can use them for my day to day work and browsing.
It seems to me that there are a significant number of research projects that are out to chec the Pope’s religion, where bears poop and how often politicians tell the truth. Here is another one where a human is ‘infected’ with a computer virus. Sadly, nowhere near as ground breaking or exciting as it sounds. It should read scientist ‘infects’ himself with computer virus. Even that would be stretching it a bit.
Although he is pointing out something that everyone should by now be totally aware of he will probably get praise and acclaim from this. In this day and age though everyone should be considering security. After my post on cars and my regular cries of keep it simple you can understand what my views are. It surprises me that people don’t see the wider implications.
I think that the first company that designs anything that kills someone because it has been remotely programmed by a hacker should have it’s entire product design team imprisoned in Thailand or something. Where they actually understand the phrase punishment.
In the meantime please send me a research grant so I can play with myself for a year and then write a report on the bleeding obvious.
For years Prince Charles has been outspoken about many architects and pissed on their vain bonfires with his views on their designs. Although I hate to admit it I am very often in agreement with him on this subject although rarely on his other comments which I will label rambling.
I always thought that the process was for someone to decide to build something to perform a purpose, pick a spot for it and then get an architect to design it and add some special features to make it special. It seems to me that architects now design something and then look for places t build it regardless of the impact it will have.
Here is a perfect example of such a design. A prison that the designer believes that people will be happy with looming over their city.
Now I for one would be very unhappy if someone decided they wanted to build one of those over where I lived. Personally I think that we should build them away from homes either buried underground or out of the way from people. With long term or dangerous prisoners being put way out of the way and in places as escape proof as possible and short term non dangerous ones being more local or just on the city limits.
The whole philosophy behind this sort of things shows that architects are more interested in getting awards than they are at building and it appears that people in the justice departments are more concerned about being at the leading edge of prisoner care than actually punishing criminals.
My prison design would be a lot simplier. Vertical storage underground, square 6×6 cells with bed and toilet with meal delivery via automated systems. Long term and dangerous prisoners locked inside while short term prisoners are allowed to attend exercise rooms, no heavy weights or martial arts kit, and education rooms where they can learn specific skills to aid in integration with both being privileges that can be lost if they misbehave. Both fed basics for food. Nobody should ever want to go back to prison.
In politics when we talk about surgical strikes we are looking at the targeting of specific groups or areas that we want to destroy without causing too much collateral damage. In reality though a surgical strike, actually like surgery itself, causes collateral damage exceeding the damage to the target itself. Rarely do we ever just get the target.
Nowhere is this clearer in the application of radiation to kill cancer cells. The collateral damage done is often more than the benefit of the destroyed cancer cells and we regularly hear that there is nothing more to be done. The cancer cells cannot be destroyed without the destruction of enough good cells to kill the patient.
No surgical tool is available that will target the cancer cells only. All tools need to pass through, either by knife or radiation, good living cells to reach their targets. This destroys those cells as well and machines have been developed to minimise that damage while maximising the damage to the cancer cells. The latest such machine is the CyberKnife. Oddly named for something with no sharp edges.
The CyberKnife is not perfect because it still damages good cells but it is the best we have at the moment yet it appears that at £2M they are too expensive for the NHS to have a few. One for each SHA for example and cancer rates would plummet from what they are now. £2M may sound a lot but it’s not even the NHS advertising budget and what do they need to advertise? For the cost of one Eurofighter or a weeks MPs salaries we could save many lives and improve our cancer survival rate from its third world status. Funny how the ‘If it saves just one life’ only seems to apply to you making sacrifices for others benefit.
I hope that our new government takes a good look at the NHS and although it is unlikely to do the right thing at least make a start by removing all the excess fat without surgical precision. Saving money that can actually be used for the benefit of ill people and not just as funding for more state workers.
As these machines become more accurate and rather than the radiation being in a pencil sized beam but instead a hair width or so and the machines move about faster and more accurately perhaps we will see the day where cancer cells are individually targeted and destroyed while living cells are only mildly irradiated and then we can see cancer survival rates increase dramatically. Great minds are working on it. Providing of course we buy some when they build them.
Compare the relatively trivial impact of a computer virus on your system, destroying your data and causing you some expense with a virus that releases the brakes on your car when you are performing heavy braking.
Car computers have been around for some time but compared to home computers there has been virtually no attempt to secure them. After all who is going to hack into a car and change something besides the manufacturer’s agents or someone on behalf of the owner getting it to maximum performance. Well until these guys looked at hacking the systems, nobody. Read the story here.
Those times are now coming to an end as now people have pointed out what you can do there will be many a nerd looking at what he can do. Car manufacturers will need to have a good look at security and what they can do to secure the systems. Personally, I think that unlike the PC OS writers the car manufacturers will be very concerned about security and will design it into the software. For one the cost implications from lawsuits are tremendous and, unlike PCs, there are alternatives.
As usual I would suggest they completely redesign their software and only make programmable what needs to be programmable with the brake levers and dashboard controls having override. They have motives in making them software controlled as they can then make overrides that can be used by Plod to stop the vehicles. How that translates to allowing the brakes to be released is not a design feature. It is clearly a bug. I wonder if that is a bug that has been exploited before. After all it wouldn’t be out of the realm of fantasy to imagine the CIA programming Castos cigar car in that way.
Well it looks like our biology classes have finally paid off. Scientists have started to create new life forms. Our first synthetic genome, named Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, was designed in a computer and brought to life using simple chemicals. The mere addition of the 1.0 makes me apprehensive. It makes me think of bugs and bug fixes. What sort of bugs could we expect and how do we control the upgrade path?
As a techie I see buggy systems and processes all the time. None make me fearful for our species as much as playing God and creating life. If we create a new plague how can we control it?
We create enough trouble on this planet creating life as it is.The population grows at a tremendous rate and we are trapped on this little rock. With the economy the way it is we will never get around to finding ways off it.
Or maybe that is the plan. Develop a new weapon and release it. Now the genie is out every military lab will have something on thier wish list.
Update 23-May-2010:17:01: Yikes. This post came across all negative and I didn’t start out that way. I see this being the way we create some algae that will eat up copious amounts of CO2 and release ozone or something we want. Something that will eat rocks and excrete oil and so on. Unfortunatly at this stage in our understanding, and make no mistake, we are at the start of the learning curve the chances are that it will be many years before we see something useful from this and that the military will have a plan on what that useful item is.
Like everything though humans are advancing. Creating life is a inevitable stap we have dreamed about for centuries and now we have done it. A new dawn heralds.
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Looking at Airships
I was quite interested to read about a giant airship to carry science back to the 1930s. In some ways a good idea. Many things were being developed and tried in the early 1900s. People were not tied down by restrictive government rules and regulations, well not in the West anyway, and many key areas were being explored and expanded.
One of the areas that was growing quickly was air travel. It was new and exciting. Not as we know now but using balloons instead. Zeppelins that was bigger than football fields but carried a few dozen at most were being developed until they all came crashing down, no pun intended, with the destruction of the Hindenburg. An entire field of aviation was consigned to the bin that day and even now we only use balloons for a few things even though even today they have several advantages over aircraft.
However, this article had little to do with going back to the 1930s as it is actually about using two of the airships advantages, a stable platform and low flight cost, as a science platform to house scientific instruments, a kind of poor mans satellite, to provide scientific research stations. Read the outline plan on using airships here.
I would like to think it could lead to us revisiting zeppelins as a viable form of transport as well as research platforms for scientific research. The benefits of them are still there and the major downside, ala Hindenburg, can be handled by new technology and new gases. The risk is significantly reduced. Sadly, the first thing you think of when you mention Zeppelins is them catching fire and crashing. Maybe they need a bit of good PR and somewhere they can be used successfully for local travel although I suspect for longer distances aircraft will win every time.