Singularity and Futurism

Introducing "Lean and Hard (dot com)"

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:46:00 +0000

My regular readers, I ask you, have I not served you well these past many years? Have I not consistently posted good and wonderful apps that you have been able to use for fun and profit? Now that I have your attention then, allow me to introduce you to my newest blogging venture, Lean and Hard (dot com).

While some of my gutter-minded friends will snicker at the name and insist that it has a mildly pornographic connotation, I assure you that it is about physical fitness. You see, my goal in life, as far as my body is concerned, is to be both lean and hard. Meaning thin and muscular. But if some folks think it's about sex and this mistaken idea prompts them to visit, I won't be upset.

I have started blogging about my travels toward this end and offering tips, motivational ideas and what humble advice I may have to assist you if this blissful condition is already or will become your own goal. I think you'll find the blog interesting and helpful. I hope the blog will also become somewhat of a community, a place where like-minded guys and gals can share their own stories.

So, now I ask you to visit my newest blog and subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for free email updates.

Don't be afraid. The killer robots are your friends!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:41:00 +0000

Wall Street Journal - May 18, 2012, by Tara McKelvey

The X-47B, the Navy's prototype for an unmanned strike plane. The aircraft may eventually be able to set off on a flight plan, identify targets and fire weapons.

In the year 2015, somewhere over the tribal territories of Pakistan, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone patrols a complex "kill zone"—an area of terrorist activity in which large numbers of civilians are also present. But on this mission, the drone isn't piloted from afar. It's on its own.

The aircraft moves closer to gather information about a potential target. Infrared cameras, heat sensors and other tools of surveillance determine whether the target is indeed a militant, examining, for instance, whether he seems ready to attack. The drone's computer system ranks the suspect on a scale from -1 (a noncombatant) to +1 (a confirmed combatant). Having determined that no children or other civilians are in the vicinity, and that everything else is in order, it chooses a weapon and fires. It then assesses the damage and either fires again or, if the enemy is dead, continues its patrol.

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Yes, you too can understand the Higgs boson

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 06 May 2012 18:08:00 +0000

Ever wonder what all the hype is about when you hear about the search of the Higgs boson? Wonder no more! I love it when someone can break down a complex subject and make it super easy to understand. This guy does it excellently!

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Spreading the Bird Flu Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 05 May 2012 16:52:00 +0000

POPSCI - 5.2.12 by Rebecca Boyle

Flu Virion This negative-stained transmission electron micrograph (TEM) depicts the ultrastructural details of an influenza virus particle, or virion. Cynthia Goldsmith, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Just a handful of genetic mutations can turn bird flu into a highly infectious pathogen that could wreak havoc on humans, according to a new paper published today. It’s the first of two controversial virus mutation papers to get its day in the sun, and it shows how the H5N1 flu could evolve to infect mammals.

To test the virus, researchers led by Masaki Imai and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison combined elements of avian flu with a recent pandemic human flu, the 2009 variant of H1N1 (you may know it as the swine flu). The new flu was capable of passing from experimental ferret to ferret through the air. (Ferrets are considered the best animal model of how flu works in humans.) The sick ferrets lost weight and had respiratory lesions, but they did not die.

"The findings described here will advance our understanding of the mechanisms and evolutionary pathways that contribute to avian influenza virus transmission in mammals," the authors write.

To understand what’s so dangerous about this virus, it helps to understand a bit about how the flu and its variants work. The name describes the molecular components of the virus; so H5N1 flu, for example, is a variant with type 5 hemagglutinin and type 1 neuraminidase proteins.

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Cadillac may introduce "Super Cruise" soon

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Thu, 03 May 2012 00:37:00 +0000

PhysOrg.com - 4.23.12 by Bob Yirka

Cadillac is reportedly joining the crowd working on features that it says should reduce car accidents by allowing the car to drive itself under optimal conditions, relieving the driver from fatigue, making road trips safer for the driver and passengers. Currently, Cadillac is already offering features that intercede on the driver’s behalf should the vehicle “sense” a dangerous situation. The new technology, which GM says likely will make it into showrooms by the middle of the decade, should make cars even safer by removing the hazard caused by human fatigue.

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Zoom in on the Milky Way - Incredible photo captures a billion stars!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:15:00 +0000

BBC - 4.29.12 by Jonathan Amos

It is built from thousands of individual images acquired by two UK-developed telescopes operating in Hawaii and in Chile.

Archived data from the project, known as the Vista Data Flow System, will be mined by astronomers to make new discoveries about the local cosmos.

But more simply, it represents a fabulous portrait of the night sky.

"There are about one billion stars in there - this is more than has been in any other image produced by surveys," said Dr Nick Cross from the University of Edinburgh.

"When it was first produced, I played with it for hours; it's just stunning," he told BBC News.

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Use the interactive tool>>

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The power of Google: Translation explosion

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:52:00 +0000

"In a given day we translate roughly as much text as you'd find in 1 million books. To put it another way: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, our system translates in roughly a single day. By this estimate, most of the translation on the planet is now done by Google Translate."

The Atlantic - 4.26.12

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Industrial Revolution Number Three

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 15:32:00 +0000

Economist - 4.21.12

OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs, stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21-metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a hammer. Jonathan Borofsky, the artist who built it, says it is a celebration of the worker using his mind and hands to create the world we live in. That is a familiar story. But now the tools are changing in a number of remarkable ways that will transform the future of manufacturing.

One of those big trade fairs held in Frankfurt is EuroMold, which shows machines for making prototypes of products, the tools needed to put those things into production and all manner of other manufacturing kit. Old-school engineers worked with lathes, drills, stamping presses and moulding machines. These still exist, but EuroMold exhibits no oily machinery tended by men in overalls. Hall after hall is full of squeaky-clean American, Asian and European machine tools, all highly automated. Most of their operators, men and women, sit in front of computer screens. Nowhere will you find a hammer.

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Wearable computers - the next big thing

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:22:00 +0000

NYT (Bits) - By NICK BILTON April 17, 2012

The wearable computing wars are about to begin, says a report released Tuesday by Forrester Research.

The report predicts that consumers will begin experimenting more with wearables over the coming year, specifically around health and fitness, navigation, social networking and gaming. This new theme among consumers will hasten big tech companies to begin creating wearable computing products.

In a blog post on the Forrester Web site, Sarah Rotman Epps, the personal computer analyst who wrote the report, said that wearable computing was about to move into the mainstream and the big technology companies in Silicon Valley would help hasten its adoption.

“Wearable devices, or ‘wearables’ for short, have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media,” Ms. Epps wrote in the blog post. “Imagine video games that happen in real space. Or glasses that remind you of your colleague’s name that you really should know. Or paying for a coffee at Starbucks with your watch instead of your phone. Wearables will transform our lives in numerous ways, trivial and substantial, that we are just starting to imagine.”

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Driverless cars are closer than you think

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:01:00 +0000

PHYS.Org - 4.13.12 by Alisa Priddle

Cars that drive themselves are not just the stuff of sci-fi movies. The technology is real, the cars can now drive legally and the debate is starting on whether society is better off when software is behind the wheel.

Automotive supplier Continental is testing a self-driving car that, by month's end, could be among the first licensed for use on public roads in Nevada, the first state to pass laws governing driverless vehicles.

Continental, which has its U.S. headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., removed brake and steering controls in a Volkswagen Passat and replaced them with sensors and advanced technology to read the surroundings and drive accordingly.

To qualify for Nevada's special license, Continental engineers have racked up and documented almost 10,000 miles of autonomous driving. That included a recent trip from Las Vegas to Brimley, Mich., where Continental has a development and testing center. More than 90 percent of the journey was without a hand on the wheel or a foot on a pedal, said Ibro Muharemovic, lead engineer of Continental's Advanced Engineering unit and one of three engineers riding shotgun.

A final trip is being planned to hit the 10,000 mark in the next few weeks.

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Sam Harris on the illusion of free will

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:25:00 +0000

I love this guy. Says profound things with ease and clarity, backed by solid science. A rare gift.

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Send the car out for food?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:58:00 +0000

New York Times (Bits) - 3.28.12 by Nick Bilton

In late 2010, John Markoff of The New York Times broke the story that Google had developed cars that could drive themselves. Now, two years later, the company has taken this innovation to a new level, teaching the cars to do something really useful: Navigating a fast food restaurant drive-through.

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Resistance is futile - Who are the flip phone holdouts?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 22:02:00 +0000

NYT - Bits 3.23.12 by Teddy Wayne

THE occasion of taking out my cellphone has provoked considerable mockery in the last 18 months or so.

“Zack Morris wants his phone back,” I have heard more than once, in reference to the “Saved by the Bell” preppie’s bricklike mobile (a late-model Motorola DynaTac, the first cellphone sold commercially, in 1983). For the sitcom’s run from 1989 to ’93, Zack’s early adoption was a totem of his Los Angeles affluence and his wheeling-and-dealing scampish streak.

Were Zack still prank-calling Principal Belding these days, he would surely have an upgrade over my calling-and-texting device. It’s a bulky clamshell phone selected for its military-grade ruggedness, as intimated by its name, the Samsung Convoy. It came free with my two-year contract. The only time it has Internet access is when I accidentally hit a button that launches a primitive Web browser (out of which, fearing usurious charges from Verizon, I exit immediately as if from a burning building).

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In Cloud We Trust - Who needs economists?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:18:00 +0000

New York Times (Bits) - 3.15.12 by Quentin Hardy

GT Nexus used shipment data to track countries’ import-export balance in 2008, left, and 2011. The diagonal line represents balanced trade.

Someday soon, the Federal Reserve may be dead, at least for economic information. Blame it on, or credit it to, cloud computing.

I recently visited the Oakland, Calif., headquarters of GT Nexus, a company that monitors supply chain information — things like ordering, payment, manufacture and logistics — for 100 major companies. Think of GT Nexus as a Facebook for corporate behavior: business partners are friends, and the completion of tasks are status updates.

The clients inside this cloud-based system include Home Depot, Sears Holdings, Adidas, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Fiat Industrial. Each giant company typically has about 1,000 other organizations involved in its business, including suppliers and manufacturers, freight companies, customs officials and banks. GT Nexus keeps straight all their goods, services and the payments involved, in real time, on a cloud-based computing platform. It is possible because so many people, things and computers are now connected to the Internet.

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When you no longer have to die

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:08:00 +0000

Thomas Frey's blog - 3.13.12

The year is 2032. You have just celebrated your 80th birthday and you have some tough decisions ahead. You can either keep repairing your current body or move into a new one.

The growing of “blank” bodies has become all the rage, and by using your own genetic material, body farmers can even recreate your own face at age 20.

In just 20 years, this is an industry that has moved from the equivalent of Frankenstein’s laboratory to the new celebrity craze, with controversy following it every step of the way.

The combination of a few high profile “accidents” along the way, coupled with those in the religious community who claim that body farmers are playing God, and asking “where does our soul reside?” has given it thousands of top media headlines around the world.

Every person on the planet has a different opinion about this moral dilemma, or whether its safe or dangerous, or whether we should just get better at repairing our existing bodies.

As medical advances continue, and we devise an entirely new range of health-enhancing options, I propose we set a new standard, raising the bar to the highest possible level. I propose we put an end to human death.

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Are we underestimating risk of human extinction?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:06:00 +0000

According to Nick Bostrom, the answer is Yes.

Atlantic - 3.6.12 by Nick Andersen

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

Bostrom, who directs Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society. Some of these existential risks are fairly well known, especially the natural ones. But others are obscure or even exotic. Most worrying to Bostrom is the subset of existential risks that arise from human technology, a subset that he expects to grow in number and potency over the next century.

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Where was this meat grown, mommy?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:56:00 +0000

Economist - 2.25.12

A QUARTER of a million euros is rather a lot to pay for a hamburger, but that will be the cost of the patty which Mark Post proposes to stick in a bun this October. The burger in question—not so much a quarter-pounder as a quarter-million-pounder—will be so expensive because it will be made from meat that has been grown from scratch in a laboratory.

Dr Post, who works at Eindhoven University in the Netherlands, belongs to a group of people who hope to disrupt one of mankind’s oldest industries—animal husbandry. In fact, they wish not so much to disrupt it as to destroy it.

Read more here.

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Will you be able to upload your consciousness into an artificial body?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:59:00 +0000

Popular Science - 3.2.12 by Clay Dillow

Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov’s vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it’s already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

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In the future, buildings may be ALIVE!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:02:00 +0000

NewScientist - February 22, 2012 by Jessica Griggs

(photo credit: Architectural Record)

A researcher specialising in architecture and synthetic biology, Rachel Armstrong imagines a future with building materials that function as part of living systems. New Scientist caught up with her to talk about her new TED book, Living Architecture.

What is wrong with today’s architecture?
The issue with modern architecture is that it is imagined through the framework and technology of the machine. We even think of ourselves as machines. Machines are good at taking resources and making objects but they’re impenetrable to the environment and they are extremely wasteful.

Currently, the best our architecture can be is carbon-neutral. You are looking to nature to go one step further?
If we change our world view from being centred on machines to being centred on ecology, it starts to become a lot easier to imagine what kinds of technology might complement this approach. The natural world is full of examples: algae technology, the use of trees like baobabs as toilets and the living root bridges of Cherrapungi, north eastern India. But they don’t fit well into an urban environment and they don’t respond fast enough for the lifestyle we demand.

Are you advocating we go back to some bucolic agrarian-based existence?
Not at all - more like a symbiotic approach between nature and existing structures and technology.

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Now that's convenience! Tele-psychiatry grows.

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:17:00 +0000

CW - 2.9.12 by Lucas Mearian

Dr. Avrim Fishkind, a psychiatrist in Houston, rarely sees any of his patients in person, and that's the way they like it.

Fishkind is part of a fast growing movement in the mental healthcare field where therapists counsel patients via inexpensive, Web-based video conferencing technology.

"We've had just over 60,000 patient encounters. To my knowledge, only six have refused to be seen via teleconferencing," he said. "When it comes to mental health issues and the difficult things you need to talk about in a crisis, a lot of patients feel it's less threatening and easier to be open and communicate via telemedicine."

Fishkind said telepsychiatry is limited only by insurance reimbursements. As more insurance companies start to reimburse for telepsychiatry treatments at the same rate as they do for in-person visits, the emerging medical field will grow exponentially.

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Three Technology Advances That Will Crank America's Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:16:00 +0000

Wall Street Journal - 1.30.12 By MARK P. MILLS AND JULIO M. OTTINO

In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

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Escaping Neutrons May Prove the Multiverse

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:06:00 +0000

POPSCI - 1.23.12 by Clay Dillow

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don’t relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult. But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The experiments would require bottling neutrons in an ultracold state, a process that physicists have been performing for years to measure how quickly neutrons decay. These bottles--made of ordinary matter imbued with magnetic fields--are able to trap these super-cooled neutrons and keep them moving slowly enough that they can be observed. Physicists can measure the rate at which these trapped neutrons strike the walls of the bottle and how quickly this rate declines as the neutrons decay.

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A Brighter Tomorrow? Interview on upcoming "Abundance"

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:01:00 +0000

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Don't look now, but the Internet is changing your brain!

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:38:00 +0000

OnlineCollege.org - January 8, 2012

Noted science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov predicted that one day, we'd "have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference materials, be something you're interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else," and with this appliance, be able to truly enjoy learning instead of being forced to learn mundane facts and figures. His insight has proven to be amazingly accurate, as we now live in a world with the Internet, where nearly the entire wealth of human knowledge can live at our fingertips or even in our pockets. Such an amazing feat, of course, doesn't happen without impacting our lives, and scientists have begun to note that the Internet has not only served to fulfill our brains' curiosities, but also rewired them. So what exactly is the Internet doing to our brains? Read on to find out.

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We almost bought the farm in 1883? Comet's near miss discovered.

noreply@blogger.com (Barry Mahfood) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:31:00 +0000

technology review (MIT)

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

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