Your place for useless information that just might possibly be interesting.
Now, a shape-shifting robot that changes to anything
http://www.business-standard.com/generalnews/news/nowshape-shifting-robot-that-changes-to-anything/88714/
In case you somehow missed watching the Terminator 2, the T-1000 is the terminator that can change its shape. Made of a ‘mimetic poly-alloy‘ it can morph to nearly anything. Well, once Skynet has taken over, all it has to do is look up the research on this and it is almost all the way there!
Court: Off-Label Drug Marketing Is ‘Free Speech’
http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/FDAGeneral/36256
It is now official (unless the Supreme Court overturns it, which isn’t likely to happen), Big Pharma can now peddle any drug that made it through the FDA approval process for anything they feel like. Given the gullibility of the sheeple (isn’t that why the FDA was created in the first place? Man, we really are going back in time, just like the GOP wants!) I am quite sure that, as the article says:
“It’s a safe bet that health outcomes will decline from medication side effects, while spending on prescription drugs will continue to rise.”
This is the _exact opposite_ of what our nation needs to get control of the spiraling health costs. But hey, as long as the rich keep getting richer, who the heck cares if a few people die? _They_ should have educated themselves!
Laptop seizures by US government highlight 9/11-era climate of fear
The treatment of dissidents is the true measure of how free a society is: consider today’s examples from the US
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/04/us-constitution-and-civil-liberties
This is a really interesting article that speaks to what it means to live (or fail to live, as is the case for US citizens today) in a free society. This last bit, I feel, is really excellent:
In essence, the bargain offered by the state is as follows: if you meaningfully challenge what we’re doing, then we will subject you to harsh recriminations. But if you passively comply with what we want, refrain from challenging us, and acquiesce to our prevailing order, then you are “free” and will be left alone. The genius is that those who accept this bargain are easily convinced that repression does not exist in the US, that it only takes place in those Other Bad countries, because, as a reward for their compliant posture, they are not subjected to it.
But even in most of the worst tyrannies, those who are content with the status quo and who refrain from meaningfully challenging prevailing power systems are free of punishment. Rights exist to protect dissidents and those who challenge orthodoxies, not those who acquiesce to those orthodoxies or support state power; the latter group rarely needs any such protections. The effect, and intent, of this climate of fear is to force as many citizens as possible into the latter group.
The true measure of how free a society is how its dissidents are treated, not those who refrain from meaningful anti-government activism and dissent. To apply that metric to the US, just look at what the American citizens quoted in this Times article this morning are saying and doing.
So, for those who still consider the US to be a ‘free’ country, I challenge you to defend the activity described in the article.
Dear Future Earthlings
A message in a bottle won’t be enough to communicate with distant generations
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/346713/title/Dear_Future_Earthlings
I don’t think I have blogged on this topic before, but I have exchanged a few ideas on the topic with a friend and figured I would mention it here. I like this idea of creating (relatively) cheap, very long-term storage that can also be computer readable. Much like a CD/DVD records bits, the sapphire disk could also record bits. Information to decode the bits could then be placed repeatedly along the edge of the disk and all that would be needed is the soul of a cryptographer, a microscope and a lot of time. The density of information could be quite high. I had (integrated circuit fabrication) masks made for me by supplying a CAD drawing that could make objects less than ten micrometers (see here if interested; it was surprisingly inexpensive). With bits 10 um on a side I calculate that you could fit 6,451,600 bits per square inch (806,450 bytes). Get 1 um on a side (something that is surely feasible) and now you can store 645,160,000 bits per square inch (or 80,645,000 bytes). The main advantage of that is you could, using the bulk processing of integrated circuit fabrication, very quickly produce completely different information on a large number of wafers, then scatter sets of them about the planet to be discovered at some point in the long distant future and hopefully decoded.
BTW, if you are interested in the manufacturer noted in the article, here is an entry into their English site: ARNANO
Your Digital Legacy: States Grapple with Protecting Our Data After We Die
http://techland.time.com/2012/11/29/digital-legacy-law/?hpt=hp_t3
This is quite interesting to me on more than one level. When my dad died a number of years ago he left quite a few on-line accounts that were now locked out because he was good and didn’t write down or share his passwords. We were never even totally sure that we identified all his accounts and my mom opted not to hire a forensic analyst to go over his machine (perhaps figuring ignorance is bliss, we never really discussed it). I think about my ‘digital legacy’ and what would happen to it if something happened to me, but haven’t got around to creating any sort of way to deal with it. In principle I think that what is needed is a secure on-line lock box that can be easily updated, but is also impossible to access without authorization. What I envision as I sit here hammering out this blog post is something with several keys to decrypt, one of which is placed in a safety deposit box somewhere to be retrieved in the event that something were to happen. The idea being that the data stored is encrypted in such a way that the entity storing it has no way to recover it, so no worries about it being stolen, but also encrypted in such a way that the data can be updated at regular intervals as new passwords and/or accounts are made and the safety deposit box key remains valid.
Of course, this data is still vulnerable to key stroke loggers, shoulder surfing and plain old guessing (one has to be able to remember the password in order to keep it updated), so it doesn’t necessarily provide more security than keeping all that stuff written down in a fire proof safe somewhere.
Tain’t an easy problem, I don’t think!
A shock to pollution in chemistry
http://www.sciencecodex.com/a_shock_to_pollution_in_chemistry-103063
I have to say that I didn’t even consider this as a possibility. The idea that meaningful chemistry could happen by shaking a bunch of raw chemicals together in a jar of vibrating steel balls is, I feel quite sure, something that would never occur to me. I like it, though, and wonder if there might be some ideas for the origin of life in it. Maybe life originated in a marine landslide?
Do Robots Rule the Galaxy?
http://news.discovery.com/space/do-robots-rule-the-galaxy-121201.html
This article also mentions the rather silly Cambridge Project for Existential Risk but since it touches on a subject I have thought about from time to time (I feel sure I blogged on it, but can’t find any such posts) I figured it would fit in nicely. I tend to agree with the notion that mechanical / silicon life is the natural extension of human intelligence (perhaps as a cyborg, perhaps as pure AI) and that, baring us extincting ourselves (certainly within our power!) I view that outcome as inevitable. The author’s particular slant, that machine intelligence would be incurious about us bits of ‘thinking meat’, I personally think is off. If the machines are incurious at all, they won’t leave the planet they were created on and I find it a bit hard to imagine any species that is curious enough to build machine intelligence without, at least accidentally, imbuing that intelligence with some of its own curiosity. Thus, I expect instead that if there is machine intelligence (something I generally accept as a given unless once created the machine intelligence immediately gets so bored it commits suicide), then we are already being observed. Perhaps the MI is waiting for an event sort of like the Vulcans in Star Trek: the invention of the warp drive. Maybe there is an unambiguous signature when a MI has been created and the existing MIs will then do a meet and greet. Either intelligent life is so extraordinarily rare (once per galaxy lifetime, for instance, something I pretty much wholesale reject as possible) that we really are (effectively; absent any ‘warp’ drive, we aren’t visiting any other galaxies) unique or we are being monitored by intelligent remote probes sent to our system. Maybe they are incredibly patient and will sit there (and have sat there) for billions of years and simply mark our existence. Maybe they are waiting for us to create our version of MI and then will seek to meld with it and take what is of benefit to them.
Maybe I am full of crap and just fantasize too much.
I earlier mentioned the undoubted hoax document meant to fire the sheeple up about a war with Iran. Well, once caught out as the idiot that he is, the original AP author has double downed on his idiocy. This guy takes it apart nicely:
AP’s George Jahn Doubles Down On Fake “Iran” Graph
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/12/george-jahn-doubles-down-on-fake-iran-graph-.html
Sadly, as mentioned in a few comments, the author’s points won’t make a damn bit of difference. These people have learned that no matter how outrageous a lie is, the sheeple will believe it no matter how much evidence has been shown to them to the contrary. Of course, this is helped immensely by the Main Stream Media only covering the initial lie and totally ignoring any contrary statements (really, one has to assume that the MSM is actually actively promoting the lies because any real reporter would find the lie the more interesting thing to report on).
The only question now is when will the war with Iran actually start. At some point, much like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, some event will be manufactured (it seems that this one failed to achieve its end) or exaggerated and our military industrial complex will get yet another trillion dollar shot of stimulus money courtesy of the US tax payers.
Ignoring the Science on Mammograms
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/ignoring-the-science-on-mammograms/
It seems there is a mammography / industrial complex now, as opposed to the ‘simpler’ healthcare / industrial complex. It is now impossible for science to intrude into the thoughts of society here in the US. Emigration really is looking like the only possible future…
DOJ Mysteriously Quits Monsanto Antitrust Investigation
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/11/dojs-monsantoseed-industry-investigation-ends-thud
Funny how our government treats everything as secret now. Soon people will be going to jail (like Bradley Manning) for leaking SEC investigations. The idiotic paranoia of the top of our government has trickled down now to the point where the ‘enemy’ is the citizen population. The last thing anyone wants is for the sheeple to realize they are, indeed, sheeple, so got to keep everything secret. This, from the ‘most transparent administration ever‘!