Daily Archives: September 23, 2011

Friday Science Roundup, September 23, 2011

Posted on by
5

Today comes at the end of one hell of a week for mind-bending (and mind-reading!) science. I have had a hell of a time narrowing the field down to only the most neuron-tingling ganglion-tickling future-tastic stories for your edification and stimulation this week.

I mean, take this story about the latest development in the field of rapid prototyping or 3D printing : assault rifle parts, and a freaking Stradivarius!

We will deal with the Strad first. Yes, it happened. Some people took a super precise scan of a genuine Stradivarius violin, the greatest violins ever made, and then someone else printed it out and gave it a try.

How did it sound? You be the judge.

I love the setting. Music in a meadow. Lovely.

As for the sound, it sounds fine to me, but then again what do I know? But nobody is claiming it’s just like the real thing. For one thing, it’s made of industrial plastics, not wood and varnish and so on. It is more the idea of it that is important, the idea that some day, rare and precious objects might well be only a few mouse clicks away.

And also rare and dangerous things. An assault rifle is a highly precise machine, and yet people are taking them apart and scanning parts of them and putting them up on the Internet. We’re far from being able to print our own AK-47s (where would the cordite come from, for one) but the real issue is that the precisely machined, painstakingly designed parts of a modern assault rifle represent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars of research and development, and a future in which anyone can get that for free from the Net is a very different kind of future indeed.

Or how about this? Some highly clever people have come up with a highly promising design for a perpetual hydrogen fuel cell that requires only salt water and fresh water to keep on making hydrogen microbially potentially forever.

I am still not entirely sold on the idea of a hydrogen future, but something like this could certainly make it more of a possibility. The technical details are neat but complicated, but all you need to know is that as long as you have salt water in one side and fresh water in the other, the salinity difference between the two gives the setup the extra juice it needs to keep the microbes happily eating waste and farting out hydrogen.

Yes…. the future may be powered by germ farts. Deal with it.

But neither of those can hold a metaphorical candle, or a real one for that matter (news stories have no hands), to this freaky bit of brain science : the first glimpse into a machine than can actually read your mind and display what you are seeing on a TV screen.

Holy Sixties Science Fiction, man.

Because this is the first good result, the images produced don’t look a whole lot like what the person is actually seeing, but they look enough like it to give anyone the willies.

Check this shit out, kiddies :

Clearly, while nobody would want to watch the reconstruction, it’s only a matter of refining the process before you are getting clearly recognizable images from inside someone’s brain.

This is the sort of science that both blows my mind and scares the shit out of me.

On the positive side, I imagine a future where someone (maybe even someone like little old me) could make a whole movie simply by imagining the images in their mind. And if they can do images, would sound be far behind?

On the negative side, reading someone’s mind is the ultimate violation of privacy imaginable. Even in the most repressive fascist states, despite all their efforts, they could not control what went on inside someone’s mind. In your mind, you were free.

In the future, maybe, not so much.

But as thrilling as that is, for sheer wondrous WTF-ness, nothing beats the big news out of CERN that recent routine neutrino experiments seem to show neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

Gee, Mister Einstein, isn’t that impossible?

Admittedly, this story is a few days old now, and by now, they might well have figured that it was all a case of human error, instrument malfunction, or something else that is completely mundane and stupid and absolutely no fun whatsoever.

But I am hoping against hope that this is totally real and we have just broken one of the biggest rules in physics and a whole new theory will be needed to account for this, because I am the sort of person who is absolutely thrilled by the discovery of the unknown and the moments when we, as a curious species, are forced to go “What the fuh…. this makes no sense at all!” and throw our hands in the air and admit we don’t know everything.

Plus hey, if neutrons can go faster than light, maybe we can too, and what kind of science fiction guy would I be if I was not super excited at the prospect of real, actual FTL?

But mostly, I just love the edges of knowledge, and am thrilled by the discovery of big, fat, juicy mysteries that reveal the majesty and wonder of the universe, and remind us that we are but children in this big complicated universe.

Dark matter. Dark energy. The universe’s expansion speeding up. And now neutrons moving faster than the speed of light.

The whole thing makes me downright giddy. It makes me want to laugh and laugh and shout “We don’t know anything! Isn’t it wonderful?”

I imagine others would be more angered or disturbed by this sort of thing. But for a thinker like me, it is the most marvelous thing in the world : a genuine mystery.

Ain’t science neat?

Another drop of relief

Posted on by
Reply

Having finally finished that damned story with Robolord and Eldrycht, and not having any red hot ideas for stories burning up my cerebellum just yet, I figured it was time to give myself a break and do a chatty blog entry about my so-called “so-called” life.

Had my third therapist’s appointment today. Doctor Costan continues to be the right sort of therapist for me. He asks the intelligent questions that keep me spooling out my guts, so to speak, and lead me to look at things differently and think and feel differently than my usual complex but self-contained brainscape.

That’s pretty much what I am looking for.

He began the session by bidding me to just start talking, something for which I was not at all prepared, but probably did me some good. After all, passivity is one of my major problems, and so having to initiate things with no warning was probably a good exercise in learning to start things myself.

But the thing I had been dreading since this therapy started, but I knew was impossible to avoid, and so I had to just grit my teeth and jump in.

I had to try to explain furry fandom to him.

And social stigma and general weirdness of the subject matter aside, it is just plain a damned complicated and tricky thing to try to explain to anybody who is not a part of it, let alone a person of a previous generation that has heard a lot about the Internet, but has never used it themselves.

The explanation ended up being so complex and intricate, in fact, that I am going to have to continue it when I saw him again Monday morning. Part 2 of a who knows how many part series in which I explain the bizarre semi-imaginary world in which I lived and in which I have lived for the last fifteen years.

If you don’t know what furry fandom is, I am sorry, but I sure as hell am not going to be able to get across to you in this blog entry. Look it up, and be prepared for a lot of sex.

We’re just like that. We’re a highly liberated, sex-positive, open kind of fandom, and that is something mainstream society, or even mainstream Internet society, is just not prepared to handle, and hence, we attract mockers and shockers and other cultural jetsam.

The flotsam is too busy watching Fox to worry about us foxes.

Health wise, it has been a somewhat rough couple of days. I keep getting this sort of deep down ache in my muscles and joints, a sort of burning feeling from deep inside the tissue, and it makes my joints very tanse and cramped feeling. Plus, I have a sinus headache that is making me feel like my teeth are in too tight.

Add in the usual treacherously unpredictable sleepiness and insomnia, and you have a bodily health period marked by intense and prolonged suckage. Hope that shit ends soon.

To a certain extent, exercise provides some relief from the cramped, too-tight feeling. So i have been doing push-ups and arm curls purely for pain relief.

If this is my body’s draconian measure to get me to exercise by making it less painful than the alternative, then bravo, you bastard, it’s working.

But remember, I know where you sleep.

And speaking of sleep, been having some weird kinda dreams lately, the kind that make me say “Holy shit…. that was fucked up!” when I recall them upon waking.

The latest one featured me, I swear to god this is true, creating a copy of myself. I don’t remember why or how, but I do remember it was part of some clever plan of mine to thwart some enemy I had in the dream. But somehow, I had got it into my head that my duplicate would simply fade away when my plan was complete, with no complications.

Nope. And so there was this duplicate version of myself roaming around, and I became increasingly worried that it was “out to get me”. (Talk about self-loathing!)

And I kept saying to people “The problem is that I am very, very sneaky… “, thus making me a dangerous opponent, I suppose.

Then at some point I was confronting my other self, and I said “Maybe you are all the evil in me, and what person hasn’t dreamed of killing all the evil inside them?”

Pretty messed up, but damned interesting too. More so than the usual lost in a weird mall kind of bullshit that I dream.

Well, that’s it from me, folkses. Later!@