In other words, yet another Just Some Stuff I Thought Was Neat edition of this rambling missive.

First…from the very bleeding edge of science, we have fun uses for those metamaterial hyperlenses we all have lying around in our junk drawers, just gathering hyperdust.

The headline for that story just sounded so cool, I had to link to it. Plus, it talks about wireless power transmission, a subject I find very interesting.

But what the hell is a metamaterial?

According to the wiki article, it’s a substance engineered to have properties not found in nature. Uh, thanks, that’s like…. most of what we humans make, right? I mean, if nature had the properties we needed, we would never have invented tools, for crying out loud.

So I am calling “bullshit” and saying the real definition is “really cool materials that do amazing freaky things and hence needed the kind of name that attracts funding”.

Anyhow, the idea is that with one particularly snazzy metamaterial made of microscopically thin loops of the same copper-fibreglass blend used in printed circuits to make an extremely precise lens that could focus the energy transmissions so tightly, it might actually be safe to transmit power at higher levels than what we currently have, which is just barely enough to activate an RFID tag.

See, the problem with transmitting any serious amount of juice is that you have to be really, really, really sure that nothing else will pick up that transmission, or Serious Bad Things happen.

Imagine someone is transmitting power enough to run a television, and your amalgam fillings plus the lemon poppy seed muffin you had with your chai this morning just happens to create the ideal conditions for receiving said transmissions…. and you get a major zap just as you drive by on the busy freeway…

So as cool a thought as wireless power is, nobody has come up with a safe way to do it yet.

Also in the realm of big deal modern science, turns out that Watson, the Jeopardy winning artificial intelligence made by IBM, is doing what people with vast amounts of intellect and knowledge always do… he’s becoming a doctor!

Well, sort of. What they are going to do is take all the amazingly advanced artificial intelligence they developed to allow Watson to interpret human speech as spoken by Alex Trebek and then find the answer in its vast database of knowledge, and use it for something a little more practical than winning Jeoprady!, namely medical diagnosis.

After all, it would be a great boon to doctors to have a computerized diagnostic assistant who knows all the latest news about all diseases and treatments, and can take a plain language question containing all the known symptoms and respond with some high level analysis resulting in some likely diagnoses.

It would not replace the doctor, of course, because for one thing, it completely lacks judgment, but it could take a lot of the cognitive burden of knowing and marshaling such an enormous amount of constantly shifting information that makes the practice of medicine so difficult today.

Theoretically, if such a system was incredibly effective, it could take the job of medical practitioner from the high level professional specialty it is today to something more like a higher end technical job.

No word yet on whether or not Watson will be programmed to understand doctor’s handwriting.

Moving over to my other favorite category, Bad Things Happening To Republicans, turns out the Paul Ryan budget, despite having passed the House ages ago, is so unpopular that Republican senators are coming out of the closet and saying they will vote against it.

Finally, moderate Republicans are sensing the way the wind is blowing and deciding that if they want to actually get re-elected, they had better come out in defense of Medicare and Social Security right now.

In other words, there’s blood in the water, and the sharks are going to start seriously ripping into one another soon. Or, more charitably, the remaining moderates in the GOP have finally been handed something so odious and politically insane that they feel relatively safe in coming out against it and staking their territory as the Not Quite Totally Insane wing.

There’s just no way the party can hold when it is so clear that the inmates are running the asylum. All this Tea Party libertarian shit is pure political poison when translated into actual policy.

And we get to watch them finally die of their terminal stupidity and outright evil.

Should be fun.