Ever so much science this week. So without further ado… 3..2..1… CONTACT!

Starting as usual with the most harmless and friendly of the back, we have scientists who have reach the highest possible resolution for laser printing : 100,000 DPI.

Why? Because they could. It is not like the human eye has a resolution that high, And to pull this off, the Singapore researchers had to print like this :

Each is a tiny gold or silver nanodisk fixed to a tiny pillar. Color is conjured by adjusting each disks diameter and the spacing between it and its neighbors, creating an effect called plasmon resonance that is perceived by the eye as different shades.

That is not exactly going to be coming to a Lexmark near you any time soon.

I mean, just imagine what they would charge for printer ink if it had gold and silver in it!

Moving on to a more more interesting limit-braking exercise, the USAF is in the very early stages of developing a hypersonic jet that could fly at speeds approaching a mile a second.

And when I say early, I mean the exploding prototypes, just past proof of concept type stage.

But still, I am including it because it is fun to imagine a future in which the jet age is replaced by the hypersonic age, and a trip from New York to Paris takes a little over an hour, and a trip from New York to Melbourne, Australia takes just under three hours.

That would be a profound world shrinking technology. I can’t imagine it will replace the airlines so much as form a layer above them. Just as now, you have big jets between big hubs, smaller jets between smaller hubs, and sometimes even prop planes to get you to the more obscure destinations, I think the hypersonic jets would be reserved only for long trips between large, distant hubs.

Unless they someone prove to be cheaper, in which case, they will take over completely. But that sounds pretty unlikely without some unforeseeable economies of scale factor changing the game.

And speaking of game changers, a coalition of ticked off Internet users have gotten together to create app.net, a new social network that plans to keep the hooligans and riffraff out by charging $50 to get in.

The sentiment appears to be the old saw that the Internet sucks now that just about anyone can get on it, and it was so much cooler when it was just us l33t nerds who were on it, and so the only solution is to create our own Internet gated community and pretend the rest of the Net does not exist.

This rankles my base egalitarianism, so I am having trouble being objective about it. It has 10,000 subscribers so far, so it is well funded enough to work. And I imagine that they will not have the problem of say Google Plus, which simply failed to reach social network critical mass and therefore people signed up only to find that nobody they knew was there.

With a $50 up-front investment, people will be far more motivated to pressure they equally pissed off friends to join up.

However, their central idea that the $50 at the door entry fee will keep out the riffraff is flawed, in my opinion. It assumes that all the Internet hooligans are poor, which is a very naive and bourgeois view of the world. And it also assumes that nobody would pay $50 just to mess with people, and that is clearly wrong. Paying $50 will make certain types of people feel entitled to do whatever they want on the service, as opposed to the implied social contract of a free service, where you paid nothing for it and lose nothing (monetarily) if it is taken away for your bad behaviour.

The other philosophical plank of their endeavour, that being a user-funded enterprise with no advertising will keep the company focused on what users what, seems dubious to me as well. Right now, their funding model is pay $50 once and you are in for life. That is a lousy business model from the customer’s point of view. After they have your money, what is their incentive to keep you happy? The incentive, in fact, is to pare operating costs down to the minimum possible in order to keep the largest amount of that initial deposit for themselves as possible.

That assumes a traditional corporate business model, of course, but I will not go further into it or I will be here all night.

Let’s just say that if they want me to fork over $50 to join a social network, it is going to have to offer an advantage far more potent than merely being “far away from the madding crowds”.

Finally, our Creepy Science story for this week. Skynet, if you are listening, this is your cue : the U.S. Navy has developed the first autonomous war-drone.

It is called the X-47B and it is capable of taking off, heading toward a target, evading enemies in hostile air place, attacking a target, and returning to base all by itself.

Well isn’t that just dandy!

It is what the Army types are calling “man-in-the-loop” technology, which means that there will be a remote pilot monitoring the X-47B at all times during operating, but all the moment to moment decisions will be made by the machine’s computer.

To me, this sounds like we are going from drone operators piloting their vehicles to them merely commanding them. The robot is now the pilot, and the operator is merely the commanding officer back at the base shouting instructions to the pilot in a movie.

And just like in that kind of movie, there is always the possibility that the drone will ignore orders and go rogue, and then what do we do? I am not talking the drone becoming evil or anything, but what if some malfunction makes it go haywire and decide a kindergarten is its target?

And of course, if it is controlled remotely, the enemy could always take control and then suddenly they have a US drone with US markings to use for whatever nasty surprises they can think up.

So color me concerned.

That’s it for this week, folks! Seeya next time!