Category: Tech

Operating, Generating, New Life.

“‘This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be…Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes.’” A front-page story in today’s WP announces we’re on the threshold of completely synthetic life — as in 2008 — made from enhanced or even artificial DNA. “Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core ‘operating system’ for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology…In the past year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been flooded with aggressive synthetic-biology claims.“

Hail Roadrunner.

“‘Nature is the final arbiter of truth,” said Seager, the Lawrence Livermore computer scientist, but ‘rather than doing experiments, a lot of times now we’re actually simulating those experiments and getting the data that way. We can now do as much scientific discovery with computational science as we could do before with observational science or theoretical science.‘” Developers tease the premiere of the first “petascale” computer, due out next year. It will be “capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second [and] akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined.” Well I, for one, welcome our new petascale overlords.

TheLeft.com

“What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past — they couldn’t get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn’t stay on message — is now an asset,’ Leyden said. ‘All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.‘” The WP’s Jose Antonio Vargas examines why the Dems are winning the Web War. “‘For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment…You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.”

Don’t Try This at Home.

“A drop of Budweiser (the ‘King of Beers’) immersed in mineral oil will form a beautiful 4 sided pyramid with sharp edges. Tiny bubbles accumulate at the top of the drop acting like a buoy that pulls on the droplet to create the growing pyramidal shape. The bubble cluster eventually spouts off in unison to the surface.” Robotics engineer and old college friend Danny Sanchez has recently created VideoPhysics.com, a site containing mpgs of various scientific properties at work, all demonstrated with the safe confines of the Sanchez Laboratories. Check it out.

Double Dip Disc Detente.

Hopefully (and cleverly) taking the sting out of the looming format wars, Warner Brothers announces the Total High Def disc at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “If broadly adopted by the industry, the Total Hi Def disc would eliminate consumer confusion by including both formats [HD-DVD and Blu-Ray] on a single disc. Tested with leading manufacturers and replicators, the Total Hi Def disc would also simplify point of sale issues for retailers by reducing the shelf space required to carry two versions of the same content.”

We’re All Doomed.

By way of my sister Tessa, a robotic gastronome determines human flesh tastes exactly like bacon (or possibly prosciutto.) Sigh…I was afraid of this. Once the machines acquire the taste, we’re all in deep, deep trouble. Or have they already figured it out, and cubicle culture is really just an attempt by the mechs to fatten us up for harvest? Hmmm…is it too late to install a vegetarian subroutine?

Phoning it in.

So, as of this morning, I’ve been moving up in the smartphone world. I awoke at 7am to find my long-suffering, increasingly indignant Treo 400 had decided overnight to up and die completely, so I bit the entropy bullet and picked up a brand-spankin’ new Treo 700 this afternoon (after, I might add, a rather miserable customer service experience that resulted in a good two hours of grappling with the Verizon Wireless bureaucracy. Apparently, despite all the hype about the national network in those aggravating ads, Verizon Kauai and Verizon NYC don’t play very nice together. Really, people, I’m trying to give you my money.) At any rate, I’m looking forward to playing around with the new apparatus, even if I did end up losing some txt conversations I wanted to keep, not to mention some truly righteous Dopewars scores.