The saddest thing I heard yesterday, from a likely student voter in
the UH college newspaper*, talking about technolgy:
All these new ideas and areas need to be regulated...
We don't know what it is yet, but we need to regulate it.
What say you?
* I'd have put a link to the actual quote online, but it was in a sidebar and apparently those don't get published with the articles online, because I couldn't find it.
Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post
or short blurb RSS feed? I'm so confident you'll love my smelly pasta plate
wisdom that I'm offering a no-strings-attached, lifetime money back guarantee!
I don't know if anyone is interested in this or not, but I thought CF people might like to see the other side of it, at least =).
DailyTech is reporting that "a recently published academic paper from the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego ... claims that Spawar scientists Stanislaw Szpak and Pamela Mosier-Boss have achieved a low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) that can be replicated and verified by the scientific community."
If it takes on, this is one of the first steps (says the article) to having cold fusion, a "potentially unlimited source of clean energy."
I've been super busy with finals coming up and projects due, and a bit more work than normal, but I did take the time to read a bit of news via
KurzweilAI today (through email, of course).
Along the lines of the "
'printer' that could build things" I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, here's
one that can build bones and
one that can build electronic circuits.
Update: And here's a
piece in the NY Times from May 7, 2007 that talks about a company who is planning to have it affordable for home users within a few years.
Thoughts?
Last night I had the good fortune to be in attendance at a talk given by
Ray Kurzweil entitled "The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One." For those unfamiliar with Ray, part of his bio as given in the program distributed at the presentation reads
Ray Kurzweil has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Moreover, Inc. magazine ranked him eighth among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison." ...
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Kurzweil was the principle developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition system.
More...
The talk was simply mind-blowing. He showed off a camera for the blind that could correct for 3D rotation and angles to read a page in a book, and some still-in-the-works but much better than currently available speech-to-speech translation (using speech-to-text, then translation, then text-to-speech). Some of the more interesting bits reminded me of a couple of ideas I had back in high school - one of combatting cancer with "machines" where they could be injected into the blood stream, detect cancer cells, and destroy them - and the other was like a "printer" that could build things, given the specs and materials (my words, not his). I should have been an inventor!
He also mentioned that we are coming ever closer to being able to reverse engineer the entire brain - saying the cerebral cortex (if I remember correctly... I could just be making that up) has already been well synthesized (along with 20 or so other parts of the brain) and that soon, we'd be able to do all the parts of the brain. Another cool bit was the fat-inhibitor pill, which would detect the gene responsible for storing fat, and switch it off.
There was a lot of AI and biotechnology involved, but the talk would still have been easy to follow for just about anyone I think (there were 1500 people or so in attendance). And the breadth and depth of his knowledge on various subjects is just simply amazing. I wish I could have made it to the follow-up this morning where it would have been just a small classroom-sized audience with a lot more interaction, but I just couldn't get away from the office for the amount of time I would have needed to (plus, it would have been rush hour, where the drive would take me 1.5 hours instead of the normal 30 minutes).
One last thing - he talked about full-immersion virtual reality- where we could switch off the actual receptors (well, more like switch what they are receiving) in our brain and replace the signal. Very cool stuff indeed, but also scary. If you're into that branch of technology, or just like to know what's coming up in the future, I'd recommend checking out his website or the books. I certainly plan to.
Update: CNNMoney has a
profile on Ray Kurzweil from May 2, 2007.
