Second Life

This site has some extremely interesting speculative ideas in it.

First, it documents the rise of real-world companies buying virtual space for promotional purposes. Real-world shoe and clothing companies have already done that. They sell products in the Virtual Reality world Second Life just as they do in the real world, because it is cheap, effective advertising for their real-world products. Toyota has also bought space, and might (I couldn't tell from the article) be selling virtual cars. This is similar to the commercialization of the internet. This movement is what will make Virtual Reality widely accessible to ordinary people.

This Google Tech Talk is by one of the creators of Second Life, and goes into more depth about the inhabitants, limitations, and economy.

The site speculates that when real-world enterprise is dominated by robots and other automatic systems, that perhaps the human economy will move wholly into virtual reality. That is a beautiful idea, because as the site documents, the economy has already entered virtual reality. It is also quite clear that a huge number of people in the world are no longer capable of supporting themselves in the increasingly high-tech world, and there is much evidence (such as Moore's Law) that suggests that by 2060 or so, almost no one will be able to support themselves in the real economy. It almost seems obvious that financial pressures will increasingly confine people to smaller and smaller spaces, while the means necessary to work and be entertained simultaneously become small enough to fit in those spaces.

As obvious as it is that Second Life is the beginning of something that will never go away, I have absolutely no desire to participate in it. We can already see that the upper class will look down on people who confine themselves to a virtual life -- "virtual people." With good reason, most people will struggle very hard to stay out of a second-hand life. This second-hand life will become more and more enticing, in most ways better than the real thing, and a tremendous amount of pressure will be brought to bear on people to push them into it. This will be called the environmental movement. Eventually though, nearly all people will prefer a primarily virtual existence to the sparsely furnished real one-room flat the government assistance affords them. Fortunately, the VR hardware will be eminently affordable. Perhaps ordinary people will still be able to afford vacations to the now pristine environmental paradise in the real world. This is the point where I can't speculate any further, because it depends on whether the virtual population mushrooms far beyond the resources of the real world. If it does, we get something like the Matrix, and if it doesn't, we get population management. The choice seems to be a moral one.

Are 1000 (or eventually 1,000,000) virtual lives more or less valuable than 1 real life? That's the question that we will be forced to answer some day by purely economic and environmental considerations.

Personally, I prefer the 1000 virtual lives, and I believe that will be the direction we will take. But perhaps some amazing discovery will forever remove the distinction between real and virtual.

Nanotube Arrangement

This article is about using nanotubes to cool microchips, which is one of the most promising near-term applications for nanotubes. It could easily be an important step in the microchip industry, which would yield lots of money for new nanotube research.

What is most interesting to me about the article is the description of the control these researchers have over the arrangement and macroscale combination of nanotubes and the chip. According to them all the techniques they used are well understood industrial processes. The end result is that nanoscale components are arranged in a fairly precise grid, and nanotubes of various widths are concentrically stacked inside each other (like a target). This shows the state of the art in nanotube positioning.

More on Nanosolar

I found Nanosolar's website today on Stumble Upon. I mentioned it in an earlier blog, but it seems to be taking off now. They claim to have a process that makes solar panels so cheaply that they are competitive with natural fuel burning. The thin film panels are "as efficient as conventional solar panels," but 100x thinner. The thin film can be applied to aluminum, making it bendable. According to Nanosolar, the panels achieve "energy payback," which I assume is the time it takes to recoup the energy put into manufacturing them, in less than one month, as opposed to previous thin film technologies which take 1.7 years. They are currently in the process of building their first large factory. Their target is to generate more solar paneling than the entire solar farming industry has now, per year.

I also found this article today, which is about the creation of nanoscale solar motors. These might be used as a film on solar panels, but their uses are almost inexhaustible.

E8 Mapped

This article is one of the strangest news stories I've seen. Mathematicians have invested a great deal of brain power and effort to map the E8 Lie group, which is a finite mathematical object of extraordinary complexity. It's about 60 gigabytes according to the article, and of such complexity that great minds have trouble figuring out how to calculate it, and have trouble even determining if they got it right. They think it may have application to theoretical physics. What's funny about that is that they don't really even understand the theories this thing applies to. They are essentially saying, "hey theoretical physics guys: we got something really weird and exotic over here, and we think you are going to like it." They leave it up to the physicists to play with it and decide whether it resembles reality. It would be even more strange if it actually worked. It would be like discovering that the universe had DNA. Here is this 60 gigabyte object that if you plug certain equations into it, it unravels the nature of the universe. It would be something like a seed to a fractal that describes the universe. It's happened all the time that mathematicians have discovered math that turned out to have important application to physics, but we can say with confidence that never before has their discovery required such complex computation. It simply has not been possible to calculate this object before the advent of today's computers. It is right on the threshold of the place where the limitations of the human brain get in the way, and we can no longer understand well enough to be of any use in the process of discovering the universe. From here on out, it is all computers. We will be like mice, and the computers will be feeding us and cleaning our cages while they go on to figure out the big questions that we can't even understand.

Mapping the Brain With Florescent Rabies

In this article they describe a ghastly experiment wherein slices of rat brain are infected with rabies genetically modified to produce florescent proteins. A number of observations here:

1. Perverse!
   
2. The closing statement of the article, "even accurate tracing methods also have their limitations. Some brain circuits are so complex that one could not hope to accurately trace all the connections within them. In the cerebellum, for example, Purkinje cells form synapses with hundreds of thousands (or perhaps up to a million) parallel fibres. Attempting to visualize the connections of a Purkinje cell, even with the most accurate transsynaptic tracer, would result in an incomprehensible image consisting of a large green blur." is amazing. Essentially, they are saying that the neural connections of some cells in a rats brain are too complex to visualize. That pretty much means that they will never be understood in a comprehensive way by people.
3. Essentially, they are using the rabies virus like a nanobot. They are using the self-replicating and behavior of rabies, which evolved naturally, to execute a simple algorithm. One can imagine that greater genetic control would allow the virus to produce more complex data, and perhaps even behave in more complex ways.
4. Mapping individual neurons has been accomplished in much less perverse ways. Neuroscientists can pinpoint live cells firing in 3-D using extremely sensitive electrodes.

Bacterial Data Storage

This article describes the work of some insane scientists who have experimented with storing data in bacterial DNA.

" DNA stores a large amount of information in a very small space. Considering that a milliliter of liquid can contain up to 10 billion bacteria, the potential capacity of bacterial-based DNA memory is enormous, assuming that the data can be retrieved in an organized way, according to Wong."

They also claim that by the process of reproduction, the stored information can be made well-nye permanent, just by releasing the bacteria. Especially if the information is encoded in radiation/mutation resistant bacteria.

A wealth of ideas come to my mind when I read this.

1. What if the internet is one day archived in bacteria?
2. What if bacteria already have information stored in them by extraterrestrial entities?
3. Is it possible to create bacteria that are already primed to evolve into higher life forms, simply by encoding dormant machinery for higher functions in their junk DNA?
4. Could it be shown that this has already happened on Earth?

Yes, of course these ideas are all insane, but that should give you a notion as to how twisted Wong and his team are.

Reflections

This article describes a piece of hardware capable of reconstructing images from partial reflections. In the example, the camera/projector reconstructs the face of a playing card turned away from the camera by studying a partial reflection off a book jacket behind the playing card. At this time, the process takes 14 minutes. This is probably the time it takes for the projector to cycle through all the tests necessary to reconstruct the image. A hardware speed-up might eventually allow real-time active vision capable of using any and all reflections to reconstruct a three dimensional environment. This could be used to create a movie camera able to effectively film from any angle in the scene (with varying clarity depending on the characteristics of the scene). It might also be used for military hardware, allowing it to see around corners to detect targets. With sufficient technology, robots will have vision extraordinarily better than ours.

Center of the Universe

Way at the end of this article is the following spooky statement by theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss:

"That is, we live in one universe, so we're a sample of one. With a sample of one, you have what is called a large sample variance. And maybe this just means we're lucky, that we just happen to live in a universe where the number's smaller than you'd predict. But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales. And of course as a theorist I'm certainly hoping it's the latter, because I want theory to be wrong, not right, because if it's wrong there's still work left for the rest of us."

It reminds me of the crazy correspondence between the size of the moon and the size of the sun, which allows a nearly perfect solar eclipse, which is sometimes offered up by Christians as evidence of God's immaculate plan.