The Future is Now- Futuristic Technology Today

A Book Store Ends: A Rant

2011-06-13T19:24:00.000-07:00

When you hear 'the future'...

Unless it's some post-apocalypse situation, or a dystopia, usually everyone thinks 'like this, but better'. More choices, better everything, greener tech, on and on. The future is supposed to be about improvements.

Caution: This is a rant!

But stay tuned for amusing chickens.

But what's here to replace the mighty book store?
So far, nothing, really. Well 'amazon' but can you go to Amazon and look at a page right in the middle of a novel? Can you go to a section and just flip through five different mangas you didn't even know existed--just to check out the art style? Sure they have 'preview' features on some books that'll give you 5 of the starting pages, but as any book store regular can attest, five pre-chosen by someone else pages isn't good enough.

When I buy online, it tends to be something I already know I want. I have to know in advance, that this is the book I'll need before getting it on amazon, or half.com or any online retailer where I can't pick the thing up first. I don't know if it's due to ultra picky nature, or just needing to know if I'm getting the right thing.

You can't browse.
With Borders Books shutting down loads of stores (due to mismanagement of money? lack of Harry potter?) Waldenbooks (remember that store which appeared in malls?) being non existent, it left Barnes & Noble as the only local retailer in the area. And now that one's closing too. That makes a single Barnes & Noble about 20 miles away the only book seller within 30 miles. And it isn't even a good store either, with lots of wasted space due to lousy architecture of the building it went into. It never had the comic book selection of the other stores and it skimps on art books. It's heavier on music, movies and a cafe. And this isn't some dinky town out in the mountains or the forest. This is a populated city style area. (so one can only imagine the plight of citizens in the countryside)

It's ok for a technology to disappear when something better in all ways can replace it.

But there's nothing yet to replace the humble brick/mortar bookseller where you could browse, and discover titles you may never have noticed. You're free to stumble onto almost anything in one of those stores. To be enlightened by content you didn't think you were interested in, to see content that's based around NOTHING you've ever shown interest in before. It's true you can find/buy nearly everything on the internet that you can put a name to...but what about the things you can't yet name? Stories not yet discovered THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH A STUPID RECOMMENDATION ENGINE. I don't care when the software finally stops recommending me irrelevant garbage--it'll never be the same as shelves to look over that were simply grouped by category.

And there's no good way to allow 'lookers' to browse the whole book online like they could in the store. The internet will simply steal things done that way. So 'a page or two, anywhere in the book' goes when the bookstores go.

People today, full of phones, facebook, and reality TV seem to hate books. But any good book looker knows the fun in such stores hasn't been replicated online yet. My interests tend toward video games, art, computers, comics, manga, sci fi, fantasy, factual science, astronomy and the occasional new novel.

However, when wandering I once found a 'the big book of absurd chickens'.
This was a photo collection of the worlds most outrageous chickens. Now one might not think that's all that interesting but once you see the plaid ones, checkered ones, and hairy footed ones, you change your mind. The devil horns ones, bald ones (no feathers at all, they're pink dinosaur looking things), turkey headed ones, and the one with the 18 foot tail you know you're in for turning the pages. That's not to even mention the 'exploding feathers' afro chicken. Is it silly? Yes. Would I have ever found it online through any site--ever? No. Would I buy it? Not really likely, but it was an experience.

It may just be a token funny experience, but it's not something I want to give up. There've been others like it, that resulted in discovering an all-new author or picking up a totally cool story I never would have thought to search, and no engine could have thought to recommend, based on any preferences. With everything trying to tailor itself to you, there's the danger of the "Preference Bubble" where you're always operating in this sphere of your own influence, never being challenged by other views or seeing anything new.

The only remaining thing is the library, for when you don't mind if someone's tried (and failed) to eat several of the book pages first. And that's if they don't cut the funding for those too. And there's a decent one in your area. So be sure to keep in mind the online library ordering system (any book to any library, yours free to rent...if you can name it, and someone hasn't stolen that critical 7th book in the manhwa series you were looking at, and if your author isnt too obscure)

So with this, book browsing/impulse buying ends, and I have to order my comic books online and hope the mail doesn't maul them. (There are no comic book stores within decent distance, either) Come on future! what 'better thing' than the brick & mortar book store do you have in store? Because I sure can't think of it.

Hands-On a Book: Megatrends 2000

2011-04-01T17:44:00.000-07:00

"The future will be determined in part by happenings that it is impossible to foresee; it will also be influenced by trends that are now existent and observable."said by Emily Greene Balch

Hands on a book:

These 'futurism' books are always interesting to read years after their predictions were to have come true. This one was dug up from a closet box. I didnt read the whole thing (nearly 400 pages) but it's an interesting peek. It covers multiple topic areas in its various chapters, and has a decent enough track record about it. It's supposed to be predicting up to the year 2000, and not beyond. It was published in 1990, and aimed to predict that whole decade.

What's messed up?
Didn't catch west vs east Germany stopping being sides. Makes separate predictions instead of figuring they'd want to try and get the country back together at some point.

Says faxes are better than email and always will be, because you can touch them and shove it in the photo copier. (Very interesting reason for WHY they were supposed to be better than email, which they do mention) Did everyone just get over their need to touch paper?

They're going to use telemarketing to help out the arts boom.
The arts never really had a boom, and telemarketing would just annoy anyone away from museums. It also said funding for sports will funnel more into the arts. Didn't really go that way, it seems. Did not catch that telemarketing would dwindle because of email / the internet, or change forms due to cell phones.

Russia + USA gets together to fix the environment.
Yea....not rly. Just because the cold war ended doesn't mean everyone gets all enviro together, I guess.

Smart Cities- 'by 2000 they'll be everywhere'. The only thing that happened toward that seems to be phones going everywhere because wifi is still so covetous and certainly

What's correct?
Individualism on the rise with cellphones. Nailed it!
Computers make individuals easier to access/understand/communicate. Yes!
(oddly though it was predicted that pcs and vhss would oppress people somehow, this book says that'll be false, and then it is correct. My DBZ tapes were quite liberating actually.
Human Genome Project will be helpful. Obviously!

Interesting views:
A VERY positive view of GMO food and engineering. All the reaction to GMO now is kneejerk=its bad! This thing raves about trying to make a potato with the protein count of meat that's 100% safe to eat, and corn that tastes buttery by itself without butter. How did those noble goals dissolve (yea..not so much noble the corn) and turn into huge monopoly corporations fighting everyone over bizzarre toxin tolerating pesticide plants? How did eating a GMO thing now equate with poisoning yourself like the thing is rat poison? What part of "Make it 100% safe for everyone & the planet" do people not get?

Surprising: That carp who has the rainbow trout gene in is mentioned in here. Everyone thinks its more recent and the fuss is still going on right now about this fish who grows faster than usual.

Year 2000 predictions didn't include the Y2K bug/mentioning any computers would have a problem with it, but they did mention religions saying how the world is going to end then. (hint: it never does end) It also said a rise in religious fundamentalism because fundies appear more often/gather more followers in times of turmoil/change/quick change as people look for 'absolutes' to guide them/anchor them through it. Certainly you HEAR more about fundies now, but does that really mean there are more of them?

It seemed to stay away from science and just throws around 'nanotech' the word and was a little more political in nature than most similar books. It didn't touch cliches like space or flying cars, and didn't seem to have any robot content or 'robots be takin our jobs'! suspicions. (though perhaps it should have)

In all, an interesting skim to see what was thought, and what actually appeared!

Watson Wins - Computer Beats Jeopardy Champs

2011-02-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

Watson has won!
IBM's super computer, Watson, has won its celebrity/charity matches on Jeopardy. It faced off against the two champions (longest winning streak guy, and most money winning guy) A blog post was already written about / introducing Watson at Cheapie Theater so this one just goes right in without background info. (Do push all links found in this post for best effect)

Most people would have put their money on Watson from the start. However, most people didn't see the NOVA PBS special that detailed the making/learning/programming process for the thing. It was wrong. A LOT. It took a huge effort to get Watson to the level it was at on the show, but most people just blow it off. "Jeopardy is easy blah blah" well no, it isn't. What IS easy is, totally failing to recognize that humans know what puns/word-play, jokes, 'hints', nick-names, and other little language features are. It wasn't even a score-less game for the humans. Watson didn't know several answers at all, and then got others very wrong, or produced some wrong variant answer anyway. The game did have suspense.

Trying to talk about Watson (try it yourself!) to someone exposes these 'take it for granteds' so fast. Most people don't even comprehend what Watson is doing, what the people did to make Watson, or anything about what the whole event means.

So what DOES it mean?
Some articles screech on that they 'wasted their time on games', or that Watson is cheating because quiz shows are EZ for PCs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jeopardy is a hurdle, a challenge. It represents languages coming together (machine 'understands' human-type speak with nuances etc etc) and a feat of programming never achieved anywhere before. It was here to make something that HAS real world applications. Rifling through loads of dull data on whatever to turn up right answers is a super important skill in so many areas. Medicine, law, history, weather, science, astronomy...they've all got loads of data where people want answers fast. Just read this somewhat slide show type thing produced by EWeek Watson Applications.

MSN/SLATE & Watson Article even had something to say via Ken Jennings. FUNNY article - Do read it.

Wackyness to spot:
1. At the end, both humans 'high five' Watson's TV...avatar...thing stand. Then, Ken gives it bunny ears.
2. Watson has 42 whirling trails that spin around the globe to denote 'thinking' (like that windows timer, or the apple hourglass or whatever) but it's 42 because of Douglas Adams.
3. All 3 of its answers display at the bottom of the TV for each question, even if it doesn't ring in. Quite a lot of the "2nd & 3rd" answers are not only wrong, they're ABSURDLY wrong. Ranging from inanimate objects where the answer is obviously a person to cities outside the USA where the question specifies it must be within the USA.
4. On 'final Jeopardy' Ken took the liberty to write in "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords" in true internet nerd style. A brilliant bit of teasing, fitting of that champion.
5. Alex nettles it as it bets odd amounts on daily doubles--but it is deaf, though he does pester other people who have done it in past games
6. I was right about the final answer (Bram Stoker) rarely do I get fianl Jeopardy but that one was easy because of Wallachia. However, it doesn't matter.

It is quite futuristic that a computer won on Jeopardy.
It seems to have also been able to do it with 15 TB of HD space. Given that most PCs (good ones at least) sold today have a 1 TB drive, that's not too shabby at all. However, likely none of that space was taken up by videos which are the space-hogs of storage. In all, it's a big victory for everyone, now that Watson won. Programs like that could be untold amounts of helpful. In a hospital, it could save lives. Seeing something 'cool' like this on TV will no doubt inspire future computer scientists, as well as current ones. That it won, just proves that the research is working, and that more 'watsons' should be really useful. Plus, once you buy it, you don't have to pay it and it never gets sick, or botches something up because it is too tired.

So: Yes it was a huge ad for what IBM was doing--but it was necisary. If someone had built "Phoenix copyRight" the superlaw computer to dig through leaglese no one would bat an eye. It took something public, fun, and really well known to spread the word. Getting people thinking and talking is the goal, and it's accomplished with flying colors!

Updating Your Scifi & Comics

2011-01-24T23:07:00.001-08:00

When the future happens...what happens to your scifi and comics?

Popular/talked about media doesn't really address this a lot. I'm not in any literary circles or anything like that to know if they do or not--but I'm sure it must come up in scifi books. The principal is this:

If you write a scifi in the 80s, you can only guess what tech they'd have.
If someone reads it in the 90s or 2000+, what happens to your guesses?

If you guessed right (colorful touch & draw pads that show you information like paper!) it seems normal. If you guess wrong (everything is printed on lightweight nickle sheets-(Thomas Edison) then it just comes up looking really wierd or like some kind of steampunk or alternate future, which was not your intent with the book.

Things made/written before this were in a time of much slower technology. Those stories didn't have to worry about it. It also appears 'wierd' today, so that the sci-fi-ness of it seems to stick. Like a vacume tube runs a TV of immense size or something. I mean, that's wierd, so it fits right in with being 'different', which is what people are going for. So now, stories can out-date themselves faster. Oh no, lookout now...someone's got A BEEPER*! It seems to be some kind of hazard, because outdated things (now) have a rep for being corney. Like people make fun of laser-disks (a big DVD) so if you had a villain or something whip one out they lose cred right away with the audience.

This Award Winning Author <--link goes to relevent blog post starts up a great post and topic about whether things SHOULD be updated or not when re-printed. Def. worth a read if you like scifi or book integrity.

So? Should you update?
Yes- You don't want the future to feel like it's stuck in the past.
No- The author intended the story that way, let it stand on its own feet.
Yes- You can only make the story cooler with cooler tech, right??
No- Let it develop along like steampunk. Let it expose past theories of the future, they're fascinating in their own right.

As you can see, there's plenty of arguments I can just make up in 1 minute. But what I really think is, the way things are going, all you're doing with updates is opening a very annoying can of worms. If you do (as it suggests) and shove in "Lady Gaga" and "CSI Shows" well then you're going to have to come around again in like 5 years and do it all again.

Annoying Worm-Can Tangent:
Movies with 'pop culture garbage' ESPECIALLY cartoons never age well. Why does no one in hollywood realize this? Endless pop cult gags (hello Shrek!) only make it look super corney 5 seconds from release. It's not a 'timeless classic' that holds up. No, not everything needs to be one, but stuff shouldn't look like a dusty geezer 8 months later. Not endearing.

Easy Avoidance Tactic-
Get creative and make stuff up! Instead of Lady Gaga, put in like...Baroness Wilde or something where YOU define her sound and YOU describe her look, if it is relevent to what you want to tell. Don't say "CSI", describe this 'detective forensics based mystery show' to your audience. It will never get out-dated because it didn't exist. I would guess that authors might end up with something more interesting in the end, because of the effort put forth.

Generalizing can also work too, by simply describing the music or the show, without giving it a title at all. However, if you're getting into tech you can't really use generalization as such a crutch to bypass...because really scifi can be a lot about tech.

A personal experience!
Yes, I have an out-dated comic book panel in my ongoing series. Someone's shown to own a CRT monitor because the comic wasn't made in the days of the flat-screen! Will I go in and change it out? Yes, because it doesn't make sense in-continuity and it never did. They were already shown to have floating holo-screens elsewhere, so a flat-screen should do in that panel.

In all, it's a curious & interesting topic. Will Cortana (from Halo) style holograms become normal? Tricorders? With the way tech is accellerating, authors may not have long to wait. (which is great!)

*Beeper:
Device that made a racket when someone called it's number. It would then display the phone number that called it, so that you would go to a phone and call that number. Basically, like some kind of near-useless answering machine you wore while you were out. No it didn't even take a message. Banned in schools because it was thought only drug-dealers used them. Why anyone ever needed one is some sort of mystery--it seemed only to add inconvenience.

Tron Time: Movie Review

2010-12-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

This thing is riddled with really huge spoilers.
BEWARE.

Tron Opinion: Good movie.
This was good in several ways that weren't 100% typical of 'hollywood'. They didn't over-explain the first one, or attempt to flashback-re-hash in some expository manner. They nod at it, and you STILL didn't have to see the first to 'get' the 2nd. Both of those are fine. (as no one is baffled, and no one else is bored)
3D- Yes.
Everyone who said this was going to be the next Avatar: no. It's not because the grid is mostly black & illuminated. You're not going to go against Pandora with that setting no matter what. The 3D is neat, but it's not Pandora. It's different, and it works. Do not confuse this with the shoddy not-in 3D things that are in 3D as a cash grab.
Making enough money?- No.
I really hope more people go to see this. It is cool. We do not need more Gullivers travels or Little Fockers. We need more Tron.

List o' likes:
1. Quorra -
She's NICE! Holy cow why is no one talking about how nice she is? She's friendly! That's...really bizzarre that it's amazing. So so so so often in movies/shows/whatever the leading lady/main-girl whatever you want to call it is mean and rotten. She's almost un-avoidably stuck up at the start, talking trash onto 'the hero'. Or is a "man hater" (those are equally annoying, dumping on guys because they're male) Or has the 'holier then thou' on her, or the dreaded 'I'm smart ur dumb take a hike'. Of course, it tends to mellow out later 'once she knows the __', but it still stinx for being predictable.

Now these faults can have 100% legit causes. Maybe all guys were mean to her, maybe she has a chip on her shoulder cause some people just do regardless of what they are. Maybe she IS smarter, but is one of those people not smart enough to not ram it down everybody's throat and then wonder why "nuuubuddy liiikes meee". They could even be un-justified causes and be part of the plot as a whole. (ie, learn a lesson)

The REASONS they're mean or unfriendly or any number of undesireable traits don't matter. It just matters that the screen is filled with prickly pretty people you wouldn't want to be pals with. Why do they do this? Why has it gone on so long that Quorra is refreshing? Part of a movie enjoyment can be going 'well gee, I'd sure meet so and so irl...they seem like a real cool dude'

2. Helmets Ahoy-
Hollywood traditionally has a problem with helmets. They want them off! Just look what happened to poor Judge Dredd. If you didn't know, apparently, in his comic one of his "Big Things" is that he never ever takes the helmet off. I think he was even drawn sleeping in it. Thus, the top half of his face likely wasn't even ever drawn. Call it a running gag (shower or smell?) or a scape-goat, if you can't respect a character's big...characterization, what the hell dude?

Props go to Rinzler for leaving the helmet on the entire time. Yes it makes it harder to pull for or against a char when you don't see the face, but who said making movies should only ever be easy and uncreative?

3. Daft Punk
I'd be willing to bet they had input in their costume design for this. 100% perfect band. Usually band cameos mess up a movie, (Vanilla Ice in my TMNT??) but here, I think it'll always work. Their sound-track has caused me to buy it, but then I always rather liked electronic.

4. No stupid cliff-hanger ending-
Things that assume they're going to have a sequel come off as totally pretentious. End the damn film properly, then work hard on another. SMB Movie, anyone? That was the first (I recall) really glaring example of sequel-begging garbage.

5. 80's era dialogue/words
If 1 more critic complains he said "Dude"......GRRR! Flynn has 80s era dialogue. He says things are Rad, and he says Dudes and Stuff. But that's called "Someone paid attention". He's been trapped in there SINCE THE 80s! He never evolved. He never moved on. He's not IRL to hear the language changing. No one in there's going to tell him different. This is the first time where someone actually acknowledges an era happened in the 80s, and that this one now, is somehow different. He is MEANT to look like an 80s throwback and talk like one too. It's authenticity, and it's logical.

6. Chess-master style nonfight-
People complain Flynn didn't fight Clu. I thought it was kind of interesting. It's chess like in the fable of 'whoever moves first, will lose'. He bought into that, and hid. Then, they show him meditating, which is likely something you'd do to keep from going crazy because you only digitized a limited library and there's only 1 person you can talk to. You also know there's another you out there who will kill you if he finds you, which will easily make you doubt anything you do, because you know he's asking "well now what would _I_ do" and likely getting the same answer.

*Clu goes to his house and touches his stuff.
This is very T-1000 in nature. In a deleted T2 scene it gets into John's room and pets his posters and his bed. It is very eerie. Clu is like that. (only they botched it up a tad with him raging at the fruit bowl)

7. The sole joke was funny-
People complained it wasn't funny enough. These same people would complain if it was funny at all, saying the humor is misplaced and stupid. The sole joke was a word/language whoops, and it was fine. Hollywood tends to try to wedge in humor where it doesn't belong. This time, they skipped it. And that is just fine.

Sequel Pokes-
There were 2 of them that were fairly obvious. First (and most) was Sam having the dog-tag like memory stick with the disk shape on it. You know for a fact all his dad's disk-data is on there. It's a sure shot to resrurect him on the grid. They even said as much when Q. gave up her disk. It'll provide the plot handle for the 2nd one, who WOULDNT want to bring daddy back from the grave? ESPECIALLY if the "matter created from nothing" lazor McGuffin can just spew him out a new IRL body after you've done the deed.

Rinzler goes white- You had to be looking for it, but as Rinzler drowned he went from orange (Clu Affiliate) to white (neutral affiliate) So you know for a fact he'll be back. (of course they'd be 100% foolish NOT to, but it's nice he got a poke to go with it)

Complain Zone!

1. Zeuz/Zeus- Dude. Makeup much? It was caked on there like a damm mime. You could see it in his hairs! These program-people are supposed to naturally be bizarre colors and styles, at least gloss the poor guy over with some CG so he looks credible. The traitorous white woman (with umbrella) was believably white. If you want him 'in make up' show him putting on makeup or something, it's the effect you could see-through, and made him look phony.

2. Laz0r McGuffin-
Holy cow this thing is godly. It can erase matter & turn it into data! (law of thermodynamics anyone?) You must over-look it because it did that in the first one.
It can also produce matter out of nothing/data! Clu knew it would/was counting on it to materialize his army into IRL. However, since it can make something out of nothing, he needn't of worried about trapping 'the creator' in the Tron world, it wouldn't of even mattered. He'd come spewing out no matter what. Based on that principal "Him in, me out" he couldn't of gotten his army out or his logic conflicts. He couldn't suck up an army worth of guys with the laser.

but not only that it can PICK CLOTHING IN FASHION! Notice how Quorra came out fully dressed and not in her Tron suit, while Sam went in with his clothes on. Why does it only go 1 way? How does lazer know what fashions iz? asks postercat. This was obnoxious because all they had to do was leave her in her suit and it eliminates the whole arguement and makes the laser less of a magical mcguffin for critics to shred. (which they did)

3. Disney shoots self in foot via Vault
You know the Disney Vault, right? It's their policy of shelving past movies for certain time periods so you CANT buy them new whenever you want. They believe it drives sales when they trot out Pinnocchio or whatever every 5 years or so. It makes people rush to buy it because it creates false-scarcity. (It also drives up prices on ebay, from which they see 0.00$)

Guess who ISNT and WASNT selling the original Tron around the time of the movie?
That's right, it's in the mouse's magic vault, doing no one any good. Oh, what about netflix, you say? PERMAHOLD. WAIT UNKNOWN. I know, I subscribe. So even if you wanted to hype yourself for it, or you were just a curious consumer debating going to see this thing, the original sure isn't going to have any say in it.
What, they were embarassed? Yes the effects were OLD but they were WIERD. They weren't old in that krappy cheezy way like the CG pythons and garbage aliens and things they used to have. You don't go "This is BS" when you see that. You just think it looks strange. But you keep watching because strange does not equal stupid.

4. Must...wedge...tv-show...in...
Critics complain that the whole Clu genocides the ISOs and Rinzler beats up people, and Flynn fights Clue/runs/goes on the run sounded interesting but got glossed over. Why did that happen? Because they are 'saving that plot' for the TV show tie in. TV show mix ins are great, but you shouldn't sacrifice or open a curiosity door really wide in a movie just to toss one in there.

5. Why did you materialize a dead pig?
Srsly. Dead pig? That's gross. Ok, you're the creator and you think food into existance so you think of the most nasty food you can? Green beans and dead pig? Eating is ill-explained here, sweeping it under the plot rug might of been better.

In all?
Go see it! The complain zone is super trivial, if you hadn't noticed. No dealbreakers at all. Hopefully this does get a sequel, you pretty much know they can do more with it now that this one and the nodding to the first is out of the way.

Pester Authority

2010-12-21T11:13:00.000-08:00

Both high tech & big brother, the 'naked scanners' at the airport become another topic of discussion. This time, the public can 'fight' back...with metallic ink.

These shirts & underwear are printed with metallic ink. Since the scanners are meant to pick up on metal items (And un-natural non-fleshy things like plastic explosives, presumably) every time someone wearing one of these is scanned, the photo should have legible words. Those words being "Read the 4th amendment, you perverts", as well as the 4th amendment, all printed out. You can see the clothing here:

4th Amendment Wear

Does it actually DO anything?
Well, like the title says, likely: "Pester Authority". They say they don't keep the images the scanners take, but that keeps getting proven untrue. I wonder how many images will end up with the words on them? Likely not enough. The site is sold out, so that's a good sign. I mean if every single flying person had one, it might raise an eyebrow or two. But it wouldn't stop anything. Once stuff like this goes in, it almost never goes back out again.

And what do the scanners do?
Pester everyone else. A story made the news yesterday where some guy got a loaded .45 onto a plane. He forgot he had it, and they never caught him until after he'd actually flown. The Shoenabomber got on an airport that wasn't in the country. So did a couple other guys who were up to no good. See, the scanners and all the security anyone can think of only works if the people you're after go through it. If they're comin' in from somewhere that doesn't have them...well nothing happens and they get right by.

Question for 45 guy: Why do you need to travel with a gun? I mean, if you need one to go there, should you really be travelling there? Could you just not go and avoid the whole thing? I mean...Skype if you're all that worried about it. Video calling? However...locked safely in a case in the non-carry-on should still be fine, if one takes all the safety measures for them into account. The bearing arms right is also important.

Best product to combine with:
The privacy underwear that're supposed to thwart the scanning things from seeing all the way through. Writing on the outsides of those would be a great plan as well. Still, it is interesting to see a little market niche cropping up like a mushroom to sell things to people, due to these scanners.

Click button for futuristic experience...

2010-11-24T20:11:00.000-08:00

It's time to take a step back...
And realize that you might actually be IN the future right now. I had such an exp. the other night upon discovering a set of videos. Now so as not to wreck the effect down...

Click button for futuristic experience: (the play button, that is)

and watch the whole thing.
What did you just see? Hatsune Miku 'not live' in concert. That was a 3D hologram giving a live concert before its fans, singing in a voice that's entirely synth'd. Based on a human voice originally...she's still a program that you have to work to make it sing. So all those glowstick waving happy people are essentially there to watch something that's not real sing in a voice that isn't either. And then you may be watching it on a screen made of PLASMA. Or possibly LIQUID CRYSTALS (LCD) And if you get satellite TV or internet RAYS FROM SPACE came down to your device to show it to you.

Holy cow if that is not futuristic I'm not sure what is. What if you timewarped back into the 1988 and said that to someone? They'd FLIP OUT and say you came from 2020, at least. But look where we are! 2010. Do you know what's sitting on the side table? A Hammacher Schlemmer catalog with the flying car on the cover. "It makes a great gift" they say. (hmf, over 100grand, I say) Yes it's a 'roadable airplane' but still! It's on a catalog cover! While I watch these nutty virtual people sing things I don't understand! yeaaaaaaaaafuture!

and for good measure here's 2 more of them going on a duet. The male thing is rather insect like, though.

Virtual nerdrage:
Did you know these guys getting lots of attention upsets the fans of The Gorillaz? They're a group from the USA who is represented by cartoon characters as well. They have also given a...well...somewhat live-ish concert with holograms of their cartoon-selves? (is it?) in a similar fashion. That is also wonderful, but the fans do wonder 'why not Gorillaz?' well....They're not cute (what with the black pits instead of eyes and all...) and they ARE voiced by real people (the band) and not some program somewhere (vocaloid) so they're similar, but not the same.

Why is it good to have a virutal star?
Virtual stars don't fall on their own. Miku is never going to go on a bender and shave her head. She's not going to die in a car wreck. She won't get into drugs and turn into a burnt out shell. She won't get beaten or abused (Beyonce, was it, that got hit?) won't turn up in the tabloids after having gained 50 pounds, all in cellulite, won't reveal herself to be a massive jerk who no one would like. She'll only sing what's popular and not go off in some unpopular 'personal' direction to 'explore herself' or get 'burn out' from being on the road.

I'm actually sorta hopin' these catch on even more.
There's so many benefits. Plus, who hasn't been a fan of someone that met an untimely end? Either via plane crash/car wreck/band split up/etc ? It's horrible to know they'll never make another song, never sing another favorite. If you didn't get to a concert but wanted to...there's nothing you can do. MJ fans were CRUSHED...as well they should be by his death. It was a tragedy to remove such a talent from the world. Miku can't have that happen.

Plus, they can only make them better as time goes on. Sure there's disadvantages too, but the whole thing's still pretty darn fascinating. But what will they call it in concert? 'Live' is a bit of a...wrongword?

Robopocalypse & Robot Uprising Movies

2010-11-04T23:20:00.000-07:00

When are we going to get a movie where robots are awesome?

The only one that's come close is Bayformers and the 2nd Terminator.
And even IT is not in the spirit of the original Transformers (or Beast Wars, if you so desire that one instead) where the show was ABOUT ROBOTS who DO THINGS. The bayformers sort of lost this, because really all of those were about Sam. Yes he interacts with giant good & bad robots, but the movie's focus is clearly him, and not say...Prime as it would have been if they'd stayed true to the show/s.

Then, you had Astroboy the USA CG adaptation which could have been good, but they totally did not pay any attention to the source material and it failed utterly.

What about "I Robot"?
Well remember, that dude (the robot) was a suspect most of the time, and not really the hero of the pic. Yes the hero was a cyborg, but that's not the same thing. (and yes, we need more cyborgs also)

What about Star Wars?
R2 couldn't technically 'speak'...any language you understood, and C3p0 was not what anyone would call heroically awesome.

Wall-E
Stands out as the only really fairly heroic modern robot, aside from Johnny-5 (though 5's movie was a tad racist and really wierdly 80s, and also full of hocus pocus tech) However, neither one really evokes the "Dude that's SO AWESOME" like say...Iron Man / War Machine does.

Terminator 2
They're CALLED cyborgs "Cybernetic Life Form" but really they're more of a reverse cyborg. The general cyborg view is an animal with attached mechanical parts (permenently) under its control (ie, an arm) or that relies upon mechanical parts to live (a robo heart) But the terminators ARE technically robots covered in an inanimate? (but alive) fleshy coating. The skin of the terminators is 'alive' but it isn't aware. It's not a different 'animal'...So really it's mostly robot. The robot is making the calls, its doing the thinking. In this case then YES, the 2nd terminator T-800 IS a 'robo hero' who was also pretty darn cool.

Now, there's news on a movie getting made called Robopocalypse with some big names attached, (Speilberg) as well as a movie 'adaptation' to 'how to survive a robot uprising' which was a book. Now, call me skeptical, but I don't think any awesome robo-heroes are going to come out of either of those. It just doesn't sound...in favor of it.

How To Survive Robot Uprising:
I own this book, and have read it. Anyone who's read it is going to ask 'well how do you do a movie out of that'. The thing is a guide. It's like if you did a movie out of a nature guide only the caterpillars were murderous. They're going to really really have to 'add on' to get it to have any sort of over-arching plot. Hell, there's not even a protagonist really. And it assumes that the robots are all evil for some reason that's (of course) never stated.

Robopocalypse:
Will they change the name? Cause right now that sounds like Sharkgator, sharktopus and the upcoming gatorsaurus rex. One can guess that robots some how cause this robopocalypse, much like they attempted in I, Robot. Only with this movie it has already occurred, so its post-apocalyptic...but you can still bet there are robots left. (wouldn't everyone just have a fit if there were 0 robots remaining, and all it was about, was the human drama after the big event?)

But, this post is here to ask:
Wouldn't it be like SO ULTRA COOL to have a robot as a main goodguy? Why does this never happen? Why are robots always bad or under suspicion? Or sidelined when they ARE good? Or that they don't talk? (bumblebee, r2, wallE & Eve) granted they didn't really need-need to talk, but there's something about talking that is also cool.

There's like 500 scenarios where you could have an awesome robo-goodguy.
(note: robocop was not a robot, he was a cyborg)

With today's special effects it'd be less of a problem even than doing something bogus, like JarJar. I mean hell, look how real Avatar NaVi people looked...and they're HARD to do being made of flesh & textures...you'd think robot-ing up the place would be the FIRST thing anyone would want to do because the effects guys would have an easier time with metal that isn't as complex as semi-translucent skin & clothes.

5 second movie plot!
Earth in the future has fought off an alien race in a single 'hive' ship similar to the one in ID4. With earth's minerals depleated, they've colonized...Planet X! Which comes under threat from what looks like 'the hive' again, only on a much smaller scale. So a ship/s /set of them is sent out to investigate the area.

The story follows the crew, and one of them is a battle robot. It's a huge "dude like" thing, like maybe 7ft or so (so you don't think it could be a guy in a suit) maybe paint it up in some camo or make it black. Maybe it has 2 slitty horizontal bars for eyes (one right over the other) or something. And it sits around for like the first half, but it has dialogue! It gets on pretty well with the 'tech guy' or 'mr fix it' who is new to the ship. As the characters are established, you find that Tech Guy thinks it could be lazy because it's never seen to do a whole lot. Throw in a bit of action or political intrigue back with Earth...and...

Well they get to the 'destination' whether it's Planet X or some moon near it, and...it's not the Hive Aliens! It's actually a fanatical group of humans with big battle robots bent on extinctifying earth humans for their own evil means of grabbing the last of the planet's resources and creating a 'pure race of humans'. They were doing things to make people think it was the hive.

The battle breaks out and the robot guy on the team is just AWESOME. You liked him before cause he's established as a nice guy on the ship...but now...He's like chain gunning everything down and being super strong, and doing these feats only a robot could do, and the battle is just a FX extravaganza of excitement. He ends up saving the Tech Guy who is totally amazed at it's cooleness (because he works on ships, not robots, he wasn't exposed to them) and there's a big showdown with like some giant Fanatic Contraption at the end. They defeat it. The End., and everybody buys an action figure of the battle robot guy (a'la all the iron man stuff thats out now)

Now I just wrote that whole thing in 5 minutes (yeeargh I timed it!) and already it has more plot twists than a faux 'nature guide' elaborated upon* which you likely already know the story to. (humans invent robots, they go wrong some how, humans have to kill them, they do, the end--unless it goes as a horror movie, in which case 'they dont, the end') Plus, people get an action figure at the end of mine. CLEARLY that is a micro-effort at doing something with a robot hero. CLEARLY if anyone put their heads together/put some thought into it they could out-do me, and that's the purpose. Now...to just hope that they do!

*Probably (I hope that is false, and it's a surprise hit)

Notes:
Robot Uprising is actually a pretty cool book. It's witty and the author did the research. If you like robots, sci fi, or good quick reads, get it. Recommended reading for sure, but recommended movie-ing? Who knows what they'll do.

Robopocalypse the book is set to appear in 2011 at some point so you won't have to wait on the movie. It should be a good clue as to how cool the movie will look though, so...probably read it. Plus I mean just look at the title, it practically compells you even if it is a bit goofy.

We complain because we care:
I'm not here to bash sci fi, effects, robots, cyborgs or any of the sort. This is a future-blog! That's practically taboo...however, the stereotypeing/single use styling of robots IS sort of annoying (even though evil robots are also cool) especially when good ones present so many opportunities for awesome.

Forgotton Knowledge of Future...Past?

2010-10-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

What do the pyramids have to do with the future?
All that speculating about what sort of technology they might have used to build 'em. Everything from floating blocks on floods to alien aid has been pointed to for the explanation. No one really knows though, (at least not right now) which always makes people ask "Well HOW the HELL do you FORGET something THAT BIG?"

And really, that's a great question.
If anyone's paying attention in any school, it gets asked. I may have discovered the answer though, and it even involves stone blocks!

If you live around Florida (or maybe somewhere else) you may have noticed cities trying to 'refurbish' urban-ish areas by laying down fancy crosswalks. Ft. Lauderdale is especially known for this habit. The red bricks are supposed to form an attractive crosswalk area, rather than just the pattern of lines. They've spent zillions laying in these bricks after busting out the old pavement.

So what's the problem?
The other day, there was 'old man'. Well, not that old, had to be 60-something, probably. And he was talking about Cobblestones. You've heard of them. They're actual stones cut into cubes and set into the ground to make old roads. Yes...kind of like the bricks in the crosswalks. Well, he was asking, why aren't all the streets cobblestones? Why did everyone get rid of these cubes created by cobblers? (who are out of a job)

Because they pop up, fall in, and can be pushed around by heavy vehicles. This nasty trend causes them to become uneven quickly. The heavier the traffic, the worse they get. Even horse n' buggy stuff would make these things go awry. They were used because no one invented blacktop yet. I have actually been on a cobble street (unused, available for rustic purposes) and indeed, you wouldn't want to rollerblade on the thing. Ever.

So this guy...he remembered some old old roads in his area that HAD been cobbled, but they were ripping them out when he was little, because they'd gone all uneven, and they wanted to freshen up the area even though it was out of the way.

Now you see, even headlined in papers like The Sun Sentinel that these crosswalks they've spent so much money on are...having bricks that either sink in, pop up, or become uneven in high traffic areas! SHOCK! So WHY did they put down bricks at heavily trafficed intersections? Because it only took...under 40 years to TOTALLY FORGET THAT COBBLESTONES ARE NO GOOD. That's not even 1 single measly generation. Look, that guy wasn't even old-old and HE remembered to 'not do that'.

All that money, all those city council members, all those approvals, the construction companies, the city planners, the voters...not a single one knew enough about history to say 'no, this is a bonehead move'.

So the pyramids are...how old?
Everyone was probably mystified by the things after 2 generations if these wise guys are any indication. This is an actual real-life example of how stupidly easy it is to forget simple concepts. And that's without active anti-knowledge campaigns that history has seen.

Progress works better when you actually remember how you did it.

Frankenfood: The GMO Food 'debate'

2010-09-29T19:31:00.000-07:00

Have you heard about genetically modified food?

GMO can be anything from the new "Frankenfish" to soy, to corn, and wheat types. Environmentalists, natural doctors, regular doctors, and even suppliment touters (usually good people) are all here to tell you GMO WILL KILL YOU NOW!! AAAaaaaah! Don't buy it! BAN BAN BAN RAWR

Even the names of the stuff are derogatory, and meant to create fear in the general listener. "Frankenfish" it's gonna grow legs, turn green and set fire to your home! It'll eat your kids! Run for the hills! You wouldn't want to eat anything called a frankenfish, or a frankenfood. And that's exactly the idea behind calling it that.

How many people have been killed by GMO food?
How many people get sick when they eat a soy bean that was GMO'd ?
How do frankenfish kill your family?

No one can answer those, because there havn't been any. Pharmacuticals don't have that record, yet they're everywhere, all the time. (har de har, with how many people die from perscription drugs you'd think an epidemic was on, yet no one notices that)

The point is that everybody who is railing against GMO that you hear is doing it without any proof that it DOES anything BAD at all. It is UNTESTED. No one has eaten the 'frankenfish' who grows bigger faster. They literally do not know if it is bad NOR do they know if it is good. They just know that it is different. That's it.

Something about 'genetically modified' drives these usually sensible natural people absolutely nutz-o. Creating a new kind of more nutritionally dense tomato that packs anti-oxidants AND flavor? What an awful thought! Can't have anyone making food healthier, now, can we? Then it wouldn't be exactly the same as it is now (bland, mostly water to add weight/higher price, and irradiated) and that's bad. You'd think natural doctors would jump all over food with better nutrition, but they can't stand it.

"One of the biggest issues I have with genetically modified foods is that the long-term effects have not been studied."

That's what one said just this week. The answer is so stupid obvous:
TEST IT
They test tons of totally awful pills on people some how. PhenPhen got on the market somehow, didn't it? Ephedra? That diabetes medication that they found out causes strokes? I mean how many of these deadly disasters did they convince some poor sap to eat? How many test groups put their lives on the line for those things? (Human Trials) And yet they can't get a test group together to eat a fish that....

Has the gene of a different but similar fish!

OMG! That's it! That's frankenfish's secret! He's got a gene from a different fish in him, and it makes him grow faster than he usually would. Actually, he grows at the rate of the other fish, that's what the gene is for! I fail to see how this is going to poison the world to death, or cause anyone who eats the fish to....whatever it is they say it makes you do. If both fish were ok to eat in the first place, it stands to reason that crossing them isn't going to create an inedible monster.

I'd sure eat the crazy fish before I'd go on some new experimental drug. And I hate fish!

GMO's problem:
The patenting. If you saw "Food Inc." and those 'roundup ready' crop seeds and how the big corporations are trying to make everybody buy their seeds, and that no one can clean their own seeds any more...that's wrong. That's using gmo to shoe-horn in on other people's legitimate business. It's like when 1 farm has a patented crop, the one next door does not. If the wind blows a patent seed onto the next farm over, the company sues it until it goes out of business. (Because the wind forced them to 'steal' the seed)
That's wrong.
Everybody knows that's wrong & unfair.
You can't fence off a farm from the wind. They're just too big. Improving things is about making the world better for everyone, not using it as an excuse to crush small farms or organic farms. But you don't hear about this aspect in the news.
Modified fish should not end up the same way. It must be made sure that none can ever escape into the wild. THAT could ruin things for other, regular fish. The same for if they do it for cows, chickens, or sheep. Animals don't blow away in the wind, they're simple to keep a hold of.

Don't use GMO as an excuse to bully, monopolize, price-fix, or stifle progress
DO test GMO rigerously for safety before even considering release

So all the GMO haters have no proof why the GMO item is bad, in most cases.
Every GMO can't be bad. People have been GMO since Mendel The Monk had his peas back in 1892 or whenever it was. (he figured out yellow peas vs green peas, short & tall peas, and how genes go to make plants do different things) When you interbreed different things so that they cause a specific result, that's modifying genetics. That's how there are tiny dogs and giant ones. It's also why most tomatos have no flavor.

(ever had a home-grown tomato? Very different from most store-ones wasn't it? Tomatos in groceries are bred to do several things
1. Last long without rotting
2. Be heavy to 'weigh in' for more profit
3. Be red so people buy it
4. Be mostly made out of water because water is cheap but heavy
5. Resist pesticides and not shrivel up in the face of poison so that it can be free of bugs/spots/holes.
Do you see the # for 'taste good' or 'be nutritious' anywhere in there? No. Because neither of those 2 are profitable now, are they?)

But all the scare tactic people are convinced that ANY tinkering at all will result in nothing but poison food and killer animals. Why? Why say that if whatever it is hasn't been tested? Why say it when no one has proof its its bad OR good? Why ban testing? Why ban TRYING?

They want to ban TRYING NEW THINGS
because they are convinced that just trying them will make disaster befall the earth. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Quick! Ban electric cars! We don't know if their electric fields will cause everyone to die, but we're pretty sure they will even though there's no proof and we've banned testing to even find out if we're right! There are so many petitions out to ban trying any GMO experiment.

The future is supposed to be a healthier place.
People living longer, better lives. Enjoying more awesome things. It's the result of progress, not the result of getting scared and stifling everything that's new. Maybe some GMO items ARE unhealthy. But maybe they're not. There's a right, and a wrong way to do things. The only way to find out is with scientific testing, trials, safety-standards and most importantly....

An open, logical mind.

The 2nd "Real" Use of 3D: Guardians of G'hoole

2010-09-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

There be owls in this post...

Legend of the Guardians:
Does it seem odd that this far into having 3D capabilities that this is only the 2nd realistic movie that's been MADE to have 3D in it? The first being Avatar, of course.

Hopefully the future is packed with tons more like this. Hopefully this movie can serve as an inspiration for all, for what you can do, and ways you should do things. This post de-rails a bit from technology & futurism to go into movie-reviewing.

First off: It is absolutely SPECTACULAR.

As by first definition: it is a spectacle.
Now, I am not your ideal audience member for this movie. I love sci fi, action, and fantasy, but I do not like owls. They are scary, and if I ever saw an IRL owl, I'd probably run away. I have never liked owls. They look like they are up to no good. And several people I have known have had encounters with malicious owls, which never helped their case. (Including an absolutely enormous one which would go after people's heads to terrify them...and it worked every time too, the thing owned an entire street) It's not like the place is all owl'd up down here (really, I've not seen a one) but I was never "o they're so cuuute!"

But if you look back on the history of 3D, however breif it is so far, all you get is this, and Avatar. Airbender shouldn't of had it, Titans had it tacked on too, and everything else has been "Cartoony Fakey Style" where they weren't trying to be realistic. Everything was NEAT YES, but also stylized. Toy Story, Monsters vs. Aliens, Despicable Me...they're real-ish in their own way, but none of them is trying to be 100% life like.

Legend of the Guardians...
Holy cow those are real owls in there. I mean feathers that are no more than 3 milimeters have a pattern on them. The beaks that are partially translucent. They blink with both sets of eyelids. They have eyelash feathers (Which if you've ever been friends with a bird, you know they do have IRL) The feathers blow in the wind but they do it in this uneven manner that happens in reality. Stuff gets wet, owls get wet. You can see INTO the scenes as you should. The texture on their foot-bottoms is spot on, (look for it!) and the mini owls are genuinely fuzzy/puffy whatever. Now I have seen a baby owl (I didnt really like it much) but that IS how they ARE.

This is AGAIN 3D how it SHOULD BE.
Everything is just so damm fascinating you want to just sit there and inspect it. If you're not impressed by the feathers, the rain, (esp. the storm bit) and the fire, then your 3D glasses aren't working or you're 1 of those people that's 3D deficient. Yes, that's a real condition, people do get it, and it is correctable. You need an eye-doctor to help you detect it and train it away.

It's not too dark, (really, for owls, they do a lot in the daytime) and really the 3D blends right in as the perfect cinema-artists' tool, just as it should. You quit going 'o this is 3d' after a while, and it just becomes part of the movie. That's how 3D is really used. That is the lesson all studios need to take. That's the thing that'll convert the '3d bashers'.

Do everything well and everyone will like you:
That's the difference between this and "Alpha & Omega". Clearly the A&O one is a silly nonsense predictable garbage about wolves with stale year 2000 animation used on it. It'll break no ground, go no-where (you ALREADY know how it ends deeerp!) and entertain small kids at most. This...can entertain anyone.

If you hate owls you'll like the action anyway. If you want cute things, you got them, if you want fights, you got that. If you want ooh & aah moments, check. If you want a plot that is **consistent with itself and actually makes sense!!** you have that too. Jokes? Yes. Nothing feels dumbed down, simplified, or 'skipped over'. (G'hoole originated as a book, a lot of times with book-to-movie the movie will feel like it's "Skipping about" even IF you didn't read the book! You can still tell) It doesn't wander down pointless plot-roads, nor does it stall out with dithering dialogue. There's pretty much something for everybody, no matter the age. That is yet another hallmark of 'doing things right'.

Personal Likes:
Snake as a good guy. Nannysnake is even fun to be around! She breaks the stuffy nanny stereotype as well, while being a good nanny still. She's pretty too. Snakes get dumped on way too much. It's wonderful to see a happy helpful snake to teach kids.

No stupid romance plots - Every romance in every movie is the same (it seems) boy likes girl, they get together for a bit, boy does something corney, girl hates him, they get back together, the end. Alladdin, Avatar, Pocahontas, Lion King, Beauty & Beast, anything...name it. THAT is how the romance will go 9 out of 10 times. Just skip it already geez.

The badguys were hard-core enough. Again, not dumbing anything down
The goodguys weren't morons. No examples of good-guy stupidity.
The plot made sense among itself-
Everyone always asks 'why are only owls here'. Well why NOT owls? There's no reason for it to not be owls. They are clearly on some type of earth-variant planet with no humans, but where most of the animals are smart. A lot of 'animals/kids stories' think they can get away with the 'sudden powers' and plot hole dealing, but this one never does that.

1 peeve:
Klud...he's clumsy but he wants to be the best at everything. So he turns evil because of that? What? Seemed a little sudden to want to whack your own family because you botched up your first 2 flying lessons. Trivial! That's the only part that could have seemed 'skipped over' in the book, if it explained him a little better.

Spoiler:
Flakes of metal- It makes sense because birds have gizzards where they store hard objects like rocks (and possibly metal chunks) to grind their food. When the objects are done, they're dispensed in the pellet. Also if you eat metal it can get into your bloodstream and stay there. It can also linger around in your gut. The only way to avoid it would have been to never touch any of the metal (like the bats) which the owls couldn't do since they are predators of mammals who accidentally eat the pieces. (presumably vampire bats or fruit bats...even insectivore bats would be fine)

Wishes!
If they've got feathers this good, what's everybody's excuse vs hair? It looks like spaghetti, feathers or bristly chunks yet. It must be stylized or it fails utterly. Hopefully these guardians share their method.

Why not have a movie where someone's a robot?
I mean, just have a detective action-duo pic, but one of them's a 6 ft 5 female android for no damm reason. No one mentions anything...she's just a robot. They solve a mystery of some kind. It looks real cool. It baffles stodgy goons. Do it so well that you can't ask "Well why a robot" and not get "Well why NOT a robot" in exchange. Certainly, it'd be better than yogi bear.

But mostly:
More that's done this well. You'll be amazed.

What's Wrong With 3D Today?

2010-08-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

What IS wrong with 3D today, in 2010?

Everybody is doing it.
Do you hear or read things like "3D sucks" "3D is such a stupid gimmick, it'll go away soon, like it should have done" , "3D was lame when it started in the 60s and it's just as bad now" or "3D is destined to fail, no one likes it" ?

It's on forums, in articles, and in essays all over the internet. But, all of the above phrases are terribly mis-informed or conclusion-jumped. Does anyone actually REALIZE WHY 3D is getting this bad rap? I sure havn't seen it spelled out anywhere, so here it is:

GREEDY COMPANIES are RUINING 3D right now.

Notice how everything is 3D even when it doesn't need it? Notice how it's being used as a lame gimmick rather than a story-telling tool? Notice how they're shoe-horning 3D into stupid situations? THAT is the reason everyone is saying it's stupid. 3D itself is far from stupid, it's brilliant. It's just being sorely abused by greedy goons who don't actually care about a new medium or tool.

Ever since Avatar came out, movie people have equated 3D with making loads more money than 2D, so they're just churning out anything and everything into 3D in hopes of a cash grab. And it's worked so far, because of "sucker audiances" and "misinformation ads" being fooled into thinking their shennanigans are the real deal. Look at:

Clash of the Titans
Last Airbender
to a degree Despicable Me
Toy Story 3

The first 2 are super guilty of tacking it on in a cash grab. The other 2 just totally didn't need it, and jammed it in at the end for another cash grab. Everyone who sees those movies in 3D says "oh there were like 2 good scenes with it...but that's it". 'False' advertising helped too...like clash of the titans 3D, those ads were there to make you think the whole thing was meant to be in 3D, but it was added in a rush at the end once everyone saw Cameron's new deal. Remember, it takes a loooong time to make a movie, when they planned/storyboarded/started shooting on Clash of the Titans, 3D was mist in the wind.

Well if your movie wasn't MEANT TO HAVE 3D in the FIRST PLACE then it's going to look stupid with it in there no matter what. Avatar was clearly always meant to be in 3D, that's why the thing worked. (no matter what you thought of the acting, the Na'vi or anything else, you have to admit the 3D was neat and used darn well in the scenes) THAT is why Avatar did so great and opened up the 3D front: it used it well, it was in there from the start.

Everything else has, to a degree, been riding around on Na'vi coat-tails...(...actual tails?) trying for more money. It only came out in December, no one has been "Sure Thing on 3D" until the movie actually came out. Till then it was all speculation, and the only rep 3D had was red and blue glasses.

At this point, the success of 3D depends on:
If the sucker studios don't run the poor damn thing into the ground. What they're doing now is only convincing people it's a stupid gimmick, and to not waste money on pricey tickets or TVs. They're scumming up the reputation of a super film making tool. It's like if you found out that foot-chase style shaky-cam made money, so then every single scene of all movies was shot with a vibrating camera. OF COURSE everyone would hate it. What's next? Larry King interviews a series of over-weight politicians in 3D? No one wants to see that. Smurfs in 3D? (it's happening, folks)

If 3D can survive this period of over-use, mis-use and money-grab abuse, then it'll stick around as a legit medium. I'm really pulling for it, and hate to see the negativity surrounding it as people blame 3D, and not the people who are shaking it down for dollars.

Naked at the Airport: Radiation Scanners

2010-07-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

Privacy is one of those things that always seems to be 'in jeopardy' in 'the future'. And, the new scanners coming soon to airports near you (the ones that use radiation to look beneath your clothes) are certainly an invasion of it.

They SAY that 'the head is erased/blurred, the image can't be taken away or used, and the people who view it never see the actual person irl that it goes with.'

However, it's becoming obvious that this isn't the case. Do you know the Bollywood Actor Shahrukh Khan? He's really famous even if you have not heard of him. Supposedly a real good guy too. Which is all well and good until he went through a scanner and later "he says he was later greeted by airport workers in London who had printouts of his x-rated X-ray"

Is it true? (seems likely)
Did he wig out and run away? (who wouldn't?)
Did he try to sue the joint? (he should)
Why did they show him the pictures? (if you don't, you've gotten away with it)

And if poor mr. filmstar isn't enough, or if 'overseas is a whole nother matter, it doesn't apply where I am!', the USA (florida to be exact) has a story of it's own. The security workers for these machines were forced to test them. Probably, they had to walk through, then view the image later to know what 'normal' images look like. Maybe they even went through tests with 'suspicious items' to see if their fellows could pick them out. Training is fine.

But one guy was a bully.
Yes, a school yard bully got a security job. (well I suppose bullies end up somewhere) After seeing the xray vision of one particular tester, he decided to hound the guy forever because he deemed the size of the dude's privates to be wrong, in his opinion. So it went on for a year, until finally the victim hit him with a security club, because no one would do anything about the guy continually harassing him. (it's like 6th grade!) Being beaten for his offense stopped the hounding, but the victim guy got in trouble as well (gee, you think?) So yea...THIS is the kind of people they've got watching everyone get naked-ified?

These 2 incidents are early on, and they do go against what people predicted.
It had originally been predicted that the images first to get stolen/distributed/etc would be females. But so far, it's 2 guys. Can you imagine the sort of kings' ransom that might get paid for naked xray pics of some star? What about someone who isn't of legal age (but almost!) to be seen naked yet? That's a perfect way to get a look at them. Especially if they were one of those 'ordinary' ones who weren't taking it off for playboy, who you'd NEVER see naked without the aid of one of those scanners. Still, "It's a matter of time", before something like that happens to some unfortunate pretty person, is the prediction.

If being clothing-free in front of everybody in 'the secret room' isn't enough to annoy you, here's a quote too:

"Dr. David Brenner of Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research says it's because the X-rays don't distribute evenly. Instead, they concentrate on the skin, which is extremely sensitive to radiation -- and that opens up the possibility of chromosome damage and even cancer."

Well skin cancer isn't one of the real deadly ones all the time, but still, do you really want to deal with melanoma or whatever this thing's going to raise your chances of? They say that getting melanoma is better than getting bombed to death but still there's got to be a better way to avoid both.

There is no safe level of ionizing radiation.
There is no safe level of mercury.
There are lots of things which have 'no safe level' for you.

These things just don't seem like a good idea for both health and privacy reasons. Are they here to stay? Will more show up? Will everyone finally put together enough studies that they change their mind and get rid of them?

Know your mind control types

2010-05-15T00:42:00.000-07:00

In the future, and even now, controlling things with your mind can be important.
There are the artificial limbs, where the best ones use nerve related control. (and nerves are controlled..by the mind) And there is, of course, that 'jedai game' where you use your mind to propell a ball around a course, by varying the airflow from beneath the game. Then, in labs, you have the one that can tell a little bit of what someone sees (blurry letters, 1 at a time, as they stare at the letter on a wall) and to tell apart things they're seeing, when it's 2 very different pictures (a hammer and a fish, it'll know it's not the fish, but that's about it)

Also when people say "mind control" the first thing that most people will come up with is some mad scientist trying to control someone elses' mind, when really the first thing anyone will get is being able to control various items WITH the mind. The other way around may end up so hard and annoying that it'll never get done the real 'mad science way'.

Type 1
Brainwave Control Style- This is the first style, and the one you see in the toys with the headbands. The first mind-game used this too, in a video game where you could bend trees, levitate your guy, and do other mundane things. This type is based on the device being able to pick up the style of waves you're sending with your brain. It's like a button pad that can only be pressed by 'feeling' a certain way. If you're calm, it pushes one, antsy, it presses another. Of course you can see that anyone setting up a program could style the 'reactions' to these simple states to do anything/make whatever they want happen.
So this isn't really 100% mind control per se, it's just pushing buttons in a different way. Instead of using a finger, you're using a feeling. And the item doesn't really know anything beyond that.

Type 2
Actual thought-use Control- This is the harder one. The one where the people looking at the letters actually got the letters to come out of the PC on the other end. It's the one the military wants too, because you could use it for "Silent microphones". (you can talk to yourself by thinking sentances! What if someone else could hear them?) This (if they ever get it going) is going to be the one where you can think windows open and shut and not need the mouse or the KB, or whatever they're planning to ditch. (so long as you wear a funky headband?)

The first type wouldn't be very practical, because if you want to use your mind control TV to turn the channel on the horror movie, you can't produce a calm state in which to do it. Same with cars. If there's anywhere someone's going to get riled up, it's in traffic.

But why is any of this important, no one's actually thinking of releasing stuff with this in it soon, are they?
Well. Nikkei (Japanese biz paper) has something else to say about that, and so do Hitachi Honda & Toyota, who are supposedly working on getting something going with it. What will they make? (Hitachi tv without a remote. But how do you fight over who is surfing, then?) A target date seems to be 2011, so it shouldn't be that much of a wait to see if anything happens.

This article
http://www.mindpowernews.com/MindReadingRobots.htm

Elaborates a bit more, but contains no actual mind reading robots. Which, really if they WERE mind reading, they wouldn't be robots, because a robot is something autonomous, and if you're controlling it's every action with your thoughts then...it's a remote control...item.

Robot Marriage Issues

2010-05-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

Every so often someone will bring up the 'they'll marry robots in the future!'
This time it's Mind Power News
http://www.mindpowernews.com/RobotMarriage.htm

dredging it up again. The article is a good enough read, though why some guy in Amsterdam knows more about Massachusets than..maybe the people who vote there, no one's too sure. But he's ready to write papers about it. (saying it's the first state that will likely allow human x robot marriage) But I'd think wherever it was that the guy married his pillow friend (did he get away with that??) would be first in line.

The article is there mostly for people to go "Ooh Unusual!" to. But what it DOESNT mention is that OF COURSE people will want to marry robots. They're already marrying everything else that doesn't even move on its own! At least 3 of them in the USA have attempted to wed their vehicle (no, it's not one even with the onboard computer, more of a 'classic styled' car & truck) Though, they weren't permitted to tie the knot because...the car never said "I do" (apparently one has to be able to verbally agree to it) Then you hear about the occaisonal dude over-seas somewhere marrying the anime-girl body pillow, or the poster/cut-out/etc of a dating-sim girl who they accidentally really fell for. Also you can easily find the 'dining together' pictures made by the same people with cute spreads of food for one or two...and across from it a photo or their virtual-character beau's smiling face on a screen...instead of a human of any sort.

These things (in that, they don't move or interact outside of a PC--at least with dating sim girl) would pale in comparison to an actually well-made (not Roxxy the frightening face zombie) who actually moved and you somehow crammed a dating sim into her. That's not ALL that future-crazy mumbo-jumbo. It'd probably be do-able today, if anyone really set mind to it.

Still, it's good to see people bringing up the issue, because as soon as (or sooner) than the robots are ready, there'll be humans waiting to marry 'em. (they're already here today!)

Facial Recognition for Everyone?

2010-04-08T14:21:00.000-07:00

When you used to hear about facial recognition, it was all 'how can we actually make it work?'

For robot pets to recognize you, or for interactivity purposes, and then even for cameras to 'see' faces so the shots come out better. And that was fine, because really, that sort of thing is neat and helpful. However...leave it to social media to find a way to wreck it up and turn it scary. New smartphone apps (and who DOESNT have a smartphone these days?) promise to allow you to ID strangers on the street.

Why?
Well supposedly you could use it vs criminals if you were a bystander at a purse snatching or something. But how often does that happen? Really though, WHO CARES about random strangers they see? The waiter? The bus driver? That dude in the starbucks reading the sports page? The answer to that is 'nosy people who likely shouldn't', and also 'stalkers'.

Why do you want to ID people you don't know, and then look up all their info? Lots of info is already available, you can even try googling yourself. Addresses, cell #s, and who knows what all else shoots out--some people have more than others. However, usually you had to have the name to start with, if this thing works, you'll only need to have seen the person.

Take pic > run thru recognition program > thats Jane Q Public, she's single > She lives here > but you know she's 45 minutes away from home in the library now > feel free to go rob her house > kthxbye

Did this not occur to anyone? Also refer to the famous "Watch your Neighbor" big brother poster (it's in England) which encourages every busybody and condo commando to get all up in EVERYbody's business as little brothers. This app should make that even more fun...for them.

However, Popular Science has a few other ideas: namely "far out" makeup patterns seen here http://www.popsci.com/node/44637/?cmpid=enews040810 that baffle most systems. Maybe THAT's the source of all the outrageous makeup you see in 'futuristic' portrayals of society. People who just want to be known/recognized by their freinds.

Samsung: Looks like the future?

2010-01-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

If you read about CES...
You may have passed over one of Samsung's offerings. Because it wasn't a product you could buy yet, and it didn't have a name, really. But it wasn't one of those corny concept things where like they show an 'artists rendering'. Well I can 'artist render' all the space ships I want and that doesn't make them come out next year....so that's hardly thrilling.

But!
This was a real working item. It was a laptop with a clear glass lid. The thing is...it was OLED and the screen part was clear. Yeah, you could see thru it as usual when 'off' but turn it on and...it's a monitor! Like on those future shows! (yay generic! EVERY future has the 'clear screen') And it works now in 2010!

Ok so...Clear Screen.
Why? The answer, most certainly, is because "It looks cool". That's pretty much the reason. They do it on the shows because well, that's awesome. Samsung probably did it for this 'wow factor' as well kind of like the Iphone did because when they showed that off...everyone had to have it.

But, will clear screens be clearly useful, or have some kind of drawback? Can you still see all the way through the graphics they're just sort of opaque? That'd be annoying. Is the clear stuff (its assumed to be glass but, proof?) really durable or extra flimsy? Is it just gee whiz or is there some sort of awesome benefit to them in a category?

You might not have to wait to find out, Samsung (again!) is supposedly releasing a IceTouch MP3 player that has a tiny clear topper that's also a screen. It looks like it could be the public's first try at a commercially available clear screen, so that's sure to be interesting.

This is one of those future things I think, that shows up a bit sooner than people expect. Hopefully it is all it's cracked up to be and is genuinely more durable/useful and awesome.

Roxxxy the Robot - Making Headlines Not Heartstrings

2010-01-12T22:30:00.000-08:00

Roxxxy the robot is making headlines.
But she's NOT new! Her whole concept is being treated like this is the first ever thing that's like that anyone's invented. She is headlining because she appeared at the Las Vegas Porn Show 2010 that happens at the same time as CES. CES is really cool because you can see the neat tech you'll be able to buy in the upcoming year, and beyond. Porn Show likely tries to sit on the coat tail of the CES. (I wonder if they mind?)

What is Roxxxy?
Well the triple X in her name makes it hard to type, but she is one of those wife-replacement dolls. Japan has had the things for ages, and frankly, they do a better job of them. Realdoll and other names have done it first, though those don't proclaim to have a personality, except that one Canadian guy's...but he built her from scratch anyway. She's making headlines not because she's ultra cool or awesome looking, but because she showed up in a famous place and the people behind her have some cashola to spend getting the word out.

Androids for sex
Yes it's going to happen. Porn pioneers almost everything because it is loaded with money and no one will ever stop it being loaded with money. That's great. Because if some VR babe finally leads me to have my VR Torchic, I will be happy. HOWEVER no one is going to take them seriuosly until someone makes an appealing one. A GENERALLY appealing one. As in a (likely female) one that appeals to a wide variety of people, and I mean the face, not the rest of it, though that has to be good too. If you make a pretty body but then put a decaying freddy head on it, some people may be able to get past it but the majority will still go 'ghe!' and leave or laugh the whole thing off as being stupid.

Roxy's problem is she is hideous.
Whoever made the face botched it up something fierce. She suffers a huuuge case of "man jaw" too close-eyes, mega-mouth, too thin nose, and possibly has buck teeth. Hair choice is also bad, the black makes her look too pale. If they wanted "Realistic" they got it because face it, most of the human race isn't attractive at all. But the POINT is that this thing should be ultimately attractive because it's an IDEAL! She's not real, so she should look ideally perfect, and this one is a megafail. No one is going to be attracted to this thing via the face. And that's like 80% the battle.

""She can't vacuum, she can't cook but she can do almost anything else if you know what I mean," TrueCompanion's Douglas Hines said while introducing AFP to Roxxxy. "She's a companion. She has a personality. She hears you. She listens to you. She speaks. She feels your touch. She goes to sleep. We are trying to replicate a personality of a person."

So she can go vs you in SSBB? Will she trash talk into your XBL? Will she creep around the house on all fours and scare the hell out of everyone? You can guess all these easily at 'no', in that she can chat and have sex and that's about it because "The anatomically-correct robot has an articulated skeleton that can move like a person but can't walk or independently move its limbs."
But she does have a heart that moves cooling liquid around in her (what, for processor overheat? Does that mean the rest of her is cold?)

They could have taken a look at some of the Japan dolls first, because while some of those are a bit creepy, many are far more realistic than this one in face beauty. One of those would at least be a bit less zombie like/manly. And speaking of manly...Rocky Robot is coming next, and if she's this bad, he's likely got to be worse.

"Roxxxy will chat with her flesh-and-blood mate, and touching her elicits comments varying according to personalities. She is wirelessly linked to the Internet for software updates, technical support and to send her man email messages. People can customize "true companion" personalities and then share the programs with others online on the company's website, according to Hines."

I do wonder if you pose her laying on her face will she nag you to be righted, like some sort of turtle? She emails you? What about? Someone who can't move can't get up to much while you're away. Will she spontaneously send you LOLCats? Does she have OnStar like if someone steals her? (gah, why!) Tech Support? I'd hate to think of a malfunctioning one. Since it can't move the limbs it's not going to go all terminator but...And, customizing personalities is great--depending how sophisticated they are. Are they as sophisticated as video games?

The dude says he did it in wishes of recreating the personality of a guy who died in 9/11. But he (naturally) hit a cost roadblock and is using Roxxxy to get past it. That's what they mean when "Porn drives innovation" pr0n will throw money at projects other genres won't. He's actually probably a smarty here, while people may say otherwise (ie offensive/blah) as it does look like a good way to get further on his core project. However, it's doubtful he'll replicate his dude without having brain-scans, extensive biographical info, 1000s of hours of video of the guy doing usual things. Which is totally awful, because if someone is that great to inspire another to want to replicate them...then...they must have really had an impact. But who knows, maybe he DOES have these things and one of the Rockies won't be Rocky...he'll end up as the guy.

Roxxxy good or bad?
Good. Anything like this that drives androids foreward, no matter the purpose is pretty cool to have around. While she may "It's a shame you can't have a robot this advanced not look LIKE A SHAMBLING HORROR FROM SLUT HELL" (in the words of www.toplessrobot.com) she may also inspire people to do better or get into the field of science/robotics.

The computing power of the brain

2009-11-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

But WHICH brain?
The computing power of brains (in general) is once again in the headlines as BlueGene (IBM's supercomputer) has now been made to simulate a cat brain. This has never before been done. A mouse brain and a rat brain, yes, but a cat...only recently! So, not surprisingly confusion results--a good excuse to talk about this futuristic topic and clear it up.

BlueGene was not built to simulate a cat.
It was made to do various really hard super-computer-ey tasks likely involving math. Much like a regular computer it can do more than 1 thing, run more than 1 program. This "Cat Cortex Simulator" is just ONE program that it (and likely only it) is able to run. It would be too hard for any other computer to do it. It REQUIRES nothing less than a supercomputer to simulate someone so somewhat-simple as a cat...and that's JUST the cortex AND it runs 100 times slower than a real cat. (So would that be like worlds most retarded cat?)

Just because it has the same POWER as a brain does NOT MEAN it'll "come to life".
This is not frosty the snowman. Many people, if you look around in comments on blogs and articles about this whole thing seem to think that if a computer can simply match the power of "a brain" (whether that be frog, cat or human) that the "Computer Brain" will then somehow suddenly spring to life as that same animal. Matching the power does not mean matching whatever it is that makes minds run. No one's yet figured that one out. So no, it's not going to be haz'ing burgers or acting uppity for a while yet.

Some of the comments here are funny though:
http://www.popsci.com/node/41101/?cmpid=enews111909

The whole thing is a fantastic learning experience for everyone who sees it.
It shows just how complicated the mind is, even if it is the mind of something very simple. Is a fruit fly smarter than your laptop? It sure runs on less energy...
That it takes a computer the size of a couple of rooms to simulate a 100x slow cat really drives it home. But, if you look up the dates you'll see mouse went first, rat came right after and now we've got cat shortly after that. Cat is likely a pretty big leap above rat for processing power, so hopefully moore's law applies to this too. After all, rats are no slouch despite the bad rap. They laugh when tickled (you just can't hear it, the sound is too high) recognize their humans, can learn tricks, memorize patterns, count, and have visual dreams much like you've experienced, and so much more.

The energy it takes to run natural brains is mystifyingly smaller than what it takes to run mechanical ones yet. No one has learned the secret to how so much power runs on so little. Look at a millipede when you see one. Look at all those feet! AND he can go in reverse, too! (I've tried) How do you coordinate all those legs steppin' along foreward or back, while waving the antenna, smelling for moldy fruit and avoiding obstacles? Even the densest beetle makes complicated snap decisions that even great robots today would have trouble with. (you know the sort that sit in the middle of walkways waiting to be stepped on, or won't move no matter how much the dog barks at it...till he finally eats it out of frusteration)

Future Question Section!
Which type of computer will simulate a big brain next? Like humans, monkies, dolphins, pigs, or whales? Which will simulate the 'next brain on the list'? (whatever that may be)

Giant room size supercomputer like BlueGene or any of the Big 5?
Smaller fuzzy logic non-traditional low-power computer in some mid-range lab?
Quantum computer finally gets off the ground and then aces it?

*Quantum circuit finally achieved (1 zero and both at once) but since it's the first one/just got it working no one's going to be simulating much on it for quite a while. Someone's going to do it, it's just a matter of what and when. (the sooner the better, really)

PETman- Look who's walking now

2009-11-10T19:47:00.000-08:00

Remember how cool Big Dog is?
It acts and walks in such a life-like way that it's un-life-like appearance sends everyone talking. Boston Dynamics is at it again, this time with 2 legs! They did such a good job with 4, it's no surprise they can handle the more difficult 2 as well.

So what's the purpose here?
A 2-leg pack mule is less efficient, so this guy is meant for chemical weapons protection testing. But for something that's meant to test clothes, it sure is complicated. (You'd think some mannequin would work...) I guess you have to be able to walk around to test clothing...really it would pull and slide as people move inside it. The aim must be to make some android-like item, dress it up, then have it walk around while hosing it down with dangerous chemicals in order to test the protection.

Why is it so cool?
Well, it's not a 'man' yet, it's just 2 legs with a box on top. But you remember ASIMO, right? That walks around on 2 legs, but you also can easily remember how slow and refined the motion is. You can't see Asimo running around in the woods, or even the parking lot without tripping or tipping over. They finally get it to trot in one video, but that's about it. Asimo is nothing like bigdog...and nothing like Petman.

The legs by themselves really move along. (It's even wearing someone's shoes! There's no flat-plate feet here) The gait looks much more natural. And yes, they do shove on it like they shove on big-dog and the thing just keeps going. It's not 100% human equivelent action, it has sort of an extra horizontal thigh-like thing working in the top because there's no real hip for it to use, but the main leg parts do indeed work the same way.

This video shows it in action!

Imagine if it DID have some sort of human-like torso on there? That would really look wild! It'd nearly be terminator-ish (well if they put a scary one on there) So far it only walks and can't run. They don't say if it can see or not, BigDog could see it's way around. The goal is actually to put the human like torso onto it so it'll wear shirts.

Does this mean whatever makes this petman work, could be used to have gundams walking around? Walking on 2 legs was always this huuuge hurdle for any robot and this looks like the first one to really nail it well, and not in some slooooow methodical way that's been demonstrated before.

This is def. technology to keep an eye on, cool things will be coming--for sure!

Carving your corneas for profit?

2009-10-08T00:29:00.000-07:00

"Specializing People" has always been a hallmark in dystopian works.

Dudes specially created to do certain jobs, for some reason, is used as a tale of woe. Sure, other things are specialized, like horses who do different things (a clydesdale will not win too many races with arabians) or dogs like the great dane who you don't really want sitting on you, but the pug who you probably don't mind.

Well with this article

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6859483.ece

Some people apparently want to customise their EYES to certain jobs. Well, what if you want to change jobs? Kind of in a pickle then aren't you. Cause once they scrape it off with a laser, that cornea stuff isn't coming back. You make the decision one time, then have to live with it forever. Or the side effects, if there are any.

The pitfall:

Who wouldn't want EVERYthing? So there's a 'menu' of eye enhancements you can get when you go in to have your nearsightedness nixed. Who wouldn't want to select ALL the options? "Oh no, I only want to have 'so-so' vision, I'll skip the 1000 meter night sight and awesome optical upgrades because...why?

See, there's no reason. Who doesn't want like...cat-like night vision of the special forces? And wasn't that whole laser eye fix supposed to be BAD for night vision anyway? Stars, halos or blurryness you can't get rid of? Maybe it's gotten a little more advanced but if someone's going around giving people super sight, why havn't we heard of it? Why wouldn't everyone want it?

Yes, you could have specialty things like a nearsighted and a farsighted eye (yeah brain, try to focus on all that at once then, when half the page you're reading is a blur due to that other eye) but the whole vision problem is caused by the eye being funny shaped.

All eyes should be spheres. Too fat or too tall makes vision skew one way or the other and the image won't focus on the lense. But no one looks at what controls the shape of the eye. It isn't "faulty cornea growing a crazy shape" it's the muscles around the eyeball that hold it in, turn it and squeeze it a little to change the focus. As a lot of people age the muscles get out of whack. They're mostly subconciously controlled so they can squeeze the eye and basically never let up. They've taken up the solution to be "Let it keep squeezing the eye into a bad shape, we'll just cut off bits of it until it's the right shape WHILE it still gets squeezed"

There's a mess of excersises that can be done to train it not to squeeze your eyes wrong any more and bring those muscles under concious control to get rid of glasses or fix vision without chopping bits off. UNLESS you have mutant eyes. Then, no amount of excersize will do anything, but there's not a whole lot of that out there.

The article doesn't mention:

Do the people with enhanced night vision give up any other part of sight?

What are the side effects?

Can it be undone if you change jobs?

If you have normal vision and you want night sight, can you get it?

Still, it is interesting that the customization seems pretty 'normal' and no one's having a fit over it even in the face of the dystopia writing that features it that has come before.

More than you wanted to know: Vision Enhancement Contacts

2009-09-02T22:29:00.000-07:00

You already know the humble contact lense as the device that corrects vision for people who's eyes are the wrong shape.

And for as long as it's been around, that's pretty much all contact lenses have done. Their only bonus feature was adding color, but that did nothing for anyone's vision. The only mega-enhancement isn't too common, which are the giant lenses worn only at night that squeeze the eye back into it's proper shape so you can do without glasses or contacts of any kind all day long. Heard of 'em? You're likely rare. It's rumored companies are paying to keep those OFF the market because they wreck glasses/contacts and laser surgery by making it un-necisary.

Contacts...of the future!
Part of making things better in the future is taking what's already around and making it better, or adding features. A phone is fine, but now it's an internet/phone/music thing. So people already wear contacts, why not add in terminator-vision? (stats on objects seen by the viewer as an overlay) or facial recognition that brings up name subtitles for the scene so you don't botch up a re-meeting?

But if you're interested in it at all, this article here is a must-see. It's super long so anything here would be re-hashing. It covers some decent science/how angles and is not all sensationalism.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0

It doesn't cover that you could conceivably use them and AR to turn ordinary places into 'game areas' and all those goodies, but if they do actually get these things made, stuff like that won't be far behind.

The first real AR Pet?

2009-08-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

You've seen AR around the blog before.
And chances are, you've had access to bits of it if you're in the USA, just out in the media, if you're looking for it. The old article was on more of a gimmic-product which was an AR girl atop a box that you could nettle in various ways. (yes Japan invented it/her you dont need to ask on this one) She wasn't particularly a pet or loaded with features other than interactive nettleability with an AR stick.

What else might you have seen?
If you have Popular Science Magazine, they had AR in there a couple of issues back. You could open the magazine in front of your webcam to get some real 3D shots of what was inside. Also, Best Buy has been doing it in their sunday circulars. (Mini booklets released freely in sunday papers to announce sales and deals) Theirs appear in the form of a black/yellow symbol or icon usually on the front page so you can get a look at some technology and also get lured to their website. It's nice, but it's no full-featured anything.

Well, Playstation is setting out to change that with the EyePet, which is a virtual AR pet. It works with the PSEye (of course) and is actually a whole game, not just a gimmic. At first, I was excited to hear this. But then...

Why is the pet so UGLY?

On something that's supposed to be cute/cuddly/you want to turn on the system to play with it so much etc. ugly is a dealbreaker! No one wants a pet hagfish, they want a guinea pig or a bunny or a dog or something. THOSE are at least cute. But this is virtual right? You have access to infinite cuteness! Combine a piggy and bunny! Make a rad little dinosaur! Who doesn't love chibi dinos? Make a baby Chocobo, or a kitten who's color you can change. I mean heck, do a tiny pony or some space pony or something even. Or a pet that evolves as you do things like a Chao. *Infinite cuteness* is at their disposal and they make...

A hairy dog/monkey/elf combo thing.

Of course, you need pix! Plus, video too so http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/08/28/eyepet-in-stores-on-november-17/

How many people is it going to appeal to? I'm sure they must have polled it, and really it's only a matter of opinion, but unless it comes with more than 1 pet, I won't get it because I don't like the creature.

None the less, it IS exciting and it does pave the way for more. You know those Nintendogs and what all else are going to want in on the AR action. If this little guy does well, the AR flood may open and bring us helluva cooler stuff. That's what's so great here, because the look is just personal opinion. You either like it or you don't, but if enough people do, I think everyone may win with some genuinely cool new forms of entertainment.

Awesomely Fast Robot Hand

2009-08-27T00:36:00.000-07:00

There really isn't anything else to call this post.
When you think of the "Robots of the Present" you might think of stuff like the Actroid, Battlebots, ASIMO, even BigDog and not so bigdog. There are also the little snakes for crawling through rubble, and that geckobot that sticks to walls and goes up them. The one thing most of these have in common is...

They're slow.

In nearly every case a human can always do whatever it is the robot is doing, faster. Outrun bigdog? NP. If you're waiting on Asimo to do anything, you're gonna be a while. It can trot but that's about it. The only case of any of these things being faster than a person (or the "matching animal" dog/horse/bird/actual gecko/whatever) are the battlebots. Flinging, spinning and chopping could be done with greater strength and speed by several people's fighting robots in this compteition.

"Slow & Jerkey" are like...robot hallmarks of the present.
Getting past that is like some kind of huge hurdle. Especially if it has to be dynamic and not pre-programmed. Interacting with real free-moving objects (ie not assembly line screws always in the same spot) requires a kind of dynamic. Like bouncing a ball or balancing an item. Maybe it won't bounce the same exact way every time. Some pre-programmed bouncer will screw it up if a speck of dust influences the ball, for example. Bigdog breaks down a lot of that with how it walks. It encounters unexpected things and compensates giving it an air of realism that make video commenters yell.

For all the "Better stronger faster" that robots are supposed to be, we've seen like...maybe 1 at a time and only applied in way way specific spots. A fork lift can lift more than you! A battle bot can spin faster! But that's been kinda it. Till...this video!

A hand with 3 fingers out-does the 5 finger folks. For most of it's stuff they've actually got to use slowmo so you can SEE IT EVEN. And look at it catch that phone! That's so hot! Yeah the tasks are specific but it's still bounce a ball which can have a not-quite expected pattern. Also knot tieing and that phone center of gravity can't be exactly where one might expect. If they continue with this at all you could get one helluva cool thing. (which really, you know they're gonna keep going)

Look at the phone catch- Something else got caught this way, do you recognize it?
The 2nd robot from Robocop 2. He caught the container of his drug of choice in a very odd fashion. Yes it was claymation or whatever they used back in the day, but the precision it took to catch the container in that specific manner was very memorable. This hand pulls off something quite similar, and could no doubt simulate the stunt from the movie if they set it to watch for 'ends of phone' rather than 'sides of phone' when looking to do the grab. No human would catch like that, likely because it couldn't. Squishy fingertips combined with reflexes that don't match miliseconds most of the time work against it.

Aside: Pen Spinning
Yes yes its from Japan. There are Japanese pen spinning championships and videos online of people who spin pens in fanciful manners. The art was no doubt honed and originated in school by bored kids. Confined and bored people get up to the most amazing of persuits, even if they may be trivial. So to have the robo hand pen spin, it would be common because it's familiar there.

Still. What if you were able to get a whole dude who was that fast, not just the arm? That's no c3p0 , that's for sure. Will this help usher in an age of actually more than capable robots? We can certainly hope so! I mean, even the terminators weren't so quick as that thing.

In Soviet Russia...TV Watches You!

2009-08-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's a meme.
But, could it come true? Explore some new technology with this article and see what could happen next. (The "in Soviet Russia..." is always followed by a wacky opposite of how things usually go such as 'chocobo rides you' etc.)

However, there are several things milling around in development which would actually let the TV watch you. The first likely mention of something like this was, I think, in 1984 the book where everyone in every country had to have a tv in the house and it was always on, and you could only lower the volume or change the channel. You couldn't mute it and you could never shut it off. It also listened to what you said and watched your activities inside your house, so the government could watch anyone at any time.

Of course, that was supposed to be a dystopia and it was imagined up by some guy who hated tv. What people have to understand is...TV IS A TOOL. It can be used for good, uesed for bad, or used to waste time. JUST LIKE a hammer or a screwdriver or any TOOL. The TV trashers seem to single it out as being some monsterous thing capable of taking over your life or possibly turning your kids into micro-murderers or something stupid. TV doesn't have any special powers and it'll always be just a tool.

However, when it starts watching you back, what is it then?
Sony would like to find out. They filed a patent with some hilariously bad illustrations for a device. I don't know if the patent people are more likely to approve you if you draw funny things for your design but it doesn't seem likely. So then why is their art so bad/funny for this? You can find out more about it here: (and see the art too, of course!)

http://www.siliconera.com/2009/08/14/scea-experimenting-with-laugh-detecting-emotional-tracking-software/

Of course, Microsoft Natal has something far better than a laff-detector, it's got a bar to put on the top that'll watch you real well so you can interact with their games. And that's just fine. Because when you're hula-hooping, 'driving', ninja fighting or any of the other myriad fun activities you can game with, that's a really super addition. You want it to be able to detect you and your friends as you have a great time and interact with it.

But, why would anyone need it for when you're not interacting in a game that was built for that kind of thing? To find out if jokes in RPGs are funny? To see if you're mad at the boss monster? The Natal sensor could go the same way, but it's not being presented in that way. Like the wiimote the Natal sensor is being presented as something that you're supposed to interact with to play its games.

If you read what they've got on the illustration/graph it looks like it's meant for TV. The thing being watched is called 'presentation' and not 'game'. If you're paying attention to the show, finding it funny, ignoring it, think it's sad etc etc and then...trying to find your demographic. Which means its inspecting you to see what you are. (What color, how old, boy or girl, where you might be from) and then it sends that data to people to look at.

Do you really want to be being watched all the time while you have the TV on? Do you want the TV telling other people who you're hanging out with, as well as 'your demographic'? Have you ever laughed at anything inappropriate that you wouldn't want other people to know you found funny? What if you cried at something too, you know it'll detect for that as well.

As a passive thing, watching you while you watch, it seems kinda creepy.
As an active thing, watching you to help you interact with content made for it, it seems really fun. Virtual pet who knows when you're feeling down! Virtual girlfriend for those people who like the little mini AR girl things and obsess over the pillow and poster girl! Now she'd be interactive and they'd be infinitely entertained. Really creepy boss who knows how to scare you! Horror game knows when you're frightened...and RPG knows when you're attracted to someone in there even though you'd kinda rather no one knew that...whoops.

This link included for the sole purpose of the people who photoshopped it into batman & the joker (other available posts contain swears, so don't read it at work or something)
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=371361

Also if you stare at it long enough you realize the shoe-wheel is going the wrong way unless he means for them to step on his butt rather than kick it. At least they're not patenting something full of gears, or it'd never work!

So is the TV of the future going to watch you too?
With all this going around...it just might.

Taxing "Fatties"? Let's control what people do!

2009-08-06T00:36:00.000-07:00

The issue at hand this time:

A "Fat Tax" in America which is very mis-labeled. It's actually a 'sweet tooth' tax and it doesn't apply to fat people, thus ruining the entire concept. Whoopee, only a government could think up something such as that, right?

First, get the story here at Six Wise Fat Tax? It's a big article to explain the whole thing. Norway is already doing it, and the premise is that it would put a generalized (thats over state sales tax etc like there is on Cigs.) tax upon non-diet sodas in order to discourage people from drinking them. The general opinion is that soda is what's making everyone fat and that jacking up the price will prevent everyone from buying the stuff. However, this is a bad idea because if you look at any of the following statements, are any of them true?

All fat people are terribly irrisponsible
Only fatties drink soda
All over weight people must be nannied in every area of life
Soda is the only thing that makes people fat

Answer: None.
*Why is this hazardous? First off, it puts uncle sam in your kitchen and home. He does not belong there.
*Next, it would shunt everyone over to diet soda, which as everyone knows is loaded with Aspartame which makes people HUNGRIER when they get too much of it. You want to talk diet destroyer, you put out the artificial chemicals. (What's their problem? The body knows they're non-nutritive...ie 0 cal...and it doesn't shut off the hunger chemical)
*Next, yes colas add calories but the problem is indeed no excersize or less of it and also over-eating of food in general.
*It could also BE the food! Food losing nutrition is a great article that needs to be looked at.
*Genetics do play a role here, people
*So do environmental factors and environmental-caused genetic changes
*Can't rule out viruses

Tin Foil Hat Alert!
When raking in megabuxx on soda loving folks doesn't stop the fat epidemic, what ELSE will Sammy look to control? Candy? Pizza? Burgers? Will ground beef skyrocket along with your Skittles? Will speak-easy pizza parlors be the next prohibition as the government attempts to rule everyones' diet through high costs? You know that a soda tax isn't going to stop the fat already. So something else will come into the target zone to get taxed to kingdom come. And then something else after that...as one by one the foods don't work. It's destined to fail and start snowballing as more and more foods are blacklisted. (foil dun dun dunnn on PURPOSE???)

Again, it'd be a war against convenience, which, unfortunately insidious DOES tend to work after a while. The cigs tax cut teen smoking by a great amount because really if it's cigs or nights out with freinds, the friends are usually gonna win. Plus the 'coolness' of smoking is on the downslide anyway. No one ever started smoking because they needed a way to get rid of their money.

The contraversy of govt vs cigarrettes is that while one head says 'smoking is bad!' the other says 'smoking is so awesome!' because HUGE astronomical revenues come from it. If everyone suddenly quit and big-cig wasn't giving the government any more money...it'd be a catastrophy. They need these nicotine addicted goons paying out loads of dough and they need more of 'em every day. Maybe that's why it's looking for something else to tax...smoking's on the slide.

Another 2-headed blathering issue:

They say the extra coin would go to help out like...healthy organic choices. But that's likely a lie because in 2009/summer a big bill on the table is to make small farms equal to big farms in order to put them out of biz with insane regulations/paperwork/fees etc. Imagine if you had to pay the tax bill of Apple Computer AND do all their paperwork because you wanted to sell 1 computer a month. That kinda thing. That and you havn't heard the horrors of 'big dairy' and what they'll do to you if you sell raw milk. (Basically if you squeeze it out of a cow and someone who doesn't own the cow drinks it, they break down your door with an uzi and confiscate small children and PCs while holding the whole family at gunpoint for hours. No, that's not made up. Look it up.) Same with organic produce people. All the government does is bash, and try to regulate it out of existance. Way to go healthy choice promoters! Let's give 'em more money and maybe they can stamp out veg all together!

Hopefully this so called 'fat tax' will just take a hike. No one wants some distopia future where you're on the run for selling gummi worms and 'pizza hut' is a thing of the past.

GM Foods - The 'scare' madness MUST stop!

2009-08-05T13:44:00.001-07:00

GM or GMO Foods (genetically modified foods) are the media's darling whipping boy.

Technically ALL foods are 'genetically modified'. Did you know that corn used to be the size of 1 finger? ALL corn. It has been cross-bred and specialized for zillions of years by native americans and others to select it for the biggest ears of corn. Bunches of other foods are like this too. The first guy who did noted research on it was a monk, Mendel, and his peas. He cross bred snap peas or something to make them different green/yellow combinations, then wrote it all down. You can look him up.

But, "GM Foods" is used to refer to plants or animals which have not been bred, but had the genetic code literally tinkered with. It's done to cause plants or animals to have certain traits. Maybe you can make a cow who's immune system attacks salmonella. That would help it be safer. Maybe you can make a cherry that is super big but still tastes great. That would be fun.

The media everywhere loves to bash it though, calling it 'franken food' and since no one understands what it really is, people are afraid of it. Lots of people would like all such GM Foods banned forever without ever studying them or learning about them. That's because many people and companies have done bad things with GM foods--especially in Europe, for whatever reason. Even in the USA, people have used genetic modification to make food poisonous.

Why would you want poisoned food?
To kill pests who would eat it. In europe they GM'd cotton so that the leaves and stems would process a pesticide inside them, from nutrients in the soil and fertalizers. It killed all the bugs who would usually eat the cotton, and it provided a good harvest. When all the cotton was collected, they decided to let cows eat the plants because they were through with them. The cows all died. It turns out it's NOT OK TO EAT POISON. (who knew?)

In Germany, many people got sick from eating GM Corn, and it killed some horses too. Can you guess why? It was LOADED with POISON PESTICIDES. Why didn't the humans die? It's actually somewhat difficult to kill humans with food. The diet is so varied, unlike most other animals. Something has to be *particularly* poisonous in small amounts to kill a human. A human may eat corn one day of the week, then not eat it again for another 2 weeks, but a horse will eat lots of corn every day. Though they're larger beings, they eat less variety, and more matter.

It seems like a stupid and obvious issue.
But no one in the media wants to see that eating something poisonous on purpose is a bad idea. If an item is MEANT to kill things, why would you want any part of it? What would make anyone think it was safe for ANYONE to eat? Just because Raid or Ant Killer spray won't kill you if you spray it on your floor, that doesn't mean its ok to drink it all. No one wants to differentiate between "horrible idea" and "helpful idea" they just want to eliminate the idea.

Cars can run people over and kill them.
Ban all cars!

You can make food poisonous if you GM it wrong
Ban all GM!

Potatoes are a member of a poisonous plant family. Their leaves are actually poisonous to eat. I'm sure with a little modification that poison could be coaxed into the potato itself. No one would want to do that, so why should making plants that kill bugs be any different? You get this article too, UK Pesticide Article
from a UK publisher that details half of all produce they get being covered in pesticide. That was the idea the GM'ers hoped they could stop. But unlike regular pesticide that's sprayed on, the ones inside the plants won't wash off.

Why is GM food imporant?
Because regular foods are losing their nutrition. They're not losing it due to GM, or global warming or any of that. Synthetic fertalizers just aren't enough to keep soil that's had the beatdown put on it for 50 zillion crops-cycles' worth 'healthy soil'. With however many millions of humans there are on the planet, plus more every day, do you think the soil is going to get easier for plants to get nutrients out of, or harder?

Plants are being bred (not gm'd now, mind you) for all the wrong things. Profit = heavier fruit not healthier fruit. So which one gets selected for genetically? ...vs which one might be better for you. Read Are Vegetables Losing their Nutrition? to get the full details on what exactly is going on.

Could better breeding stop some of that stuff? Maybe, but it'll take a while. But how many 10x servings of spinach are you willing to eat until someone figures that out? In the case of "if it looks like a tomato, and it smells like a tomato, then it must be a tomato" the answer is still 'yes' only this time it's full of water and non-nutritive fillers.

Could GM stop some of the stuff from the article? (it's happening regardless of what anyone legislates) Yeah probably if anyone actually bothered to assosicate 'food' with 'nutrition' any more and actually GM'd for the right things. (ie. not poison)

The bottom line:
Anything that CAN be used to save human life and human health SHOULD be explored responsibly and not blindly fear-mongered against just because it's ill-understood and some whack jobs abused it.

Evolution - Girls Get Prettier?

2009-07-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

So says The TIMES Online.
You can read the original here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6727710.ece

So if girls are prettier now than they were in the past, that means that the trend COULD continue on into the future and now it's relevant to the blog. The article explains pretty well, but it doesn't explain everything. Some may even try to debunk it with the 'standards of beauty' arguement.

Different times / different cultures find different things pretty:
This is TRUE. Like, a long time ago it was AWESOME to be doughy and pale. If you were pale you were probably rich /didn't need to be out side. If you were flabby you could afford loads of food. As you see today, the opposite is true (If you tan, you've got the time to do it, and if you're fit you can clearly work out or try to keep healthy despite the nasty artificial foods abounding) But SOME things don't change across time or culture. THATS what they're measuring. Not just "Oh it's my opinion..."

Clear skin
Waist/Hip/Shoulder/Head ratio
Symmetry in body and face
Health of hair (No it doesnt matter the type or color of hair healthy hair looks healthy)
Health of teeth (no culture has found snaggle-tooth-ness to be attractive)
Obviously not sick/illness/defect of some kind

There are likely scientific names for all of the above to measure, plus more. So that's what's in use so it can apply to anyone at any time. You can't go back too far though, or you get out of the era of photos and into the era of art. Art isn't 100% accurate like a photo so you could get an idea, not just a big one. Plus, having art done of someone was expensive back in the day. Not many people were likely to have had it done.

The article also mentions an interesting new stat that pretty couples are more likely to have daughters. The usual stat on that is about 51 to 49 with boys being in the minority as with other species too. But this says TWENTY SIX percent less likely to have a male. Something's going on.

"If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable, it logically follows that women over many generations gradually become more physically attractive on average than men.”

So...human+female = opposite of birds
With birds it's the dude who is the pretty one with fancy colors and flashy styles. But this thing says humans are the opposite where the female is all flashy and the males are plain. Yes physical attractiveness is based on heritable things because looks of all sorts are inherited from both sides unless you're a clone or they tinker with you before you're born. (See the Select-a-baby post!)

And about that hitler guy...
Yes he did try something like making everyone more beautiful but since he was a total wacko his method was 'kill everyone else who doesn't fit in' and of course it failed. But this 'natural selection stuff' as someone crudely put it 'ugly girls dont get dates' causes the extremely gradual phasing out of 'less pretty' traits from the general population of everyone everywhere.

Dicey Future?
The article mentions dudes aren't selected so much for looks as the girls are. They're selected for 'success' which is more of a learned trait. ANYone of any type can be successful. Plus there's the whole pretty girl has 26% less chance to have a boy as a kid thing working against them too. It talks about kings and rich guys having more kids.

So where does that leave stupid guys?
No where much because if they're not determened, won't better themselves, not driven, simply unlucky, PLUS they're no stunner, they're likely to go no-where. However...the 'success' is not something inherited or genetic it's in the personality which is under the person's own control. You may be 'pre disposed to things' but it's ultimately up to you. There's also too many factors vs. this whole 'who is successful' thing.

However:
What of people who have an easy time memorizing things? Photographic memories? People to whom math or money logic comes easily? People for whom music is an easy gift? Or perhaps nice coordination for sports?
These genetic-related conditions DO exist. Some people find art nearly impossible but math super easy. Others are the opposite. If studying is a cinch due to your ability memorize things others must take their time with...you're certainly more likely to go far and 'be a success' than someone who struggles with the same material. Of course any of that can be overcome for the most part--even in sports. (barring things like the 4ft basketball player wannabe)

What about stupid girls?
You can be pretty and dense, or pretty and briliant. But according to the article you only need one...the 'pretty' part. Which is a little on the "Yikes" side because it sounds a lot like the school yard meme "Girls go to jupiter to get more stupider..." only at the end of that rhyme lies not 'candy bars' but something more sinister. Humanity being able to survive and out think any crisis from without (meteors/going to mars/aliens) or within (disease/environment/climate/crazy people) needs to ALWAYS be able to count on both types of humans to be at the top of their wits to out-smart everything together and continue to succede.

Not much to worry about?
Not really. The whole thing is so slow that everyone will be able to genetically fix up any look they want long before the whole little scenario plays out. Beauty comes in all forms too, it's not like "Plain People" never have happy families and wonderful kids. Really in the end the important thing is the beauty of the mind of everyone .

Uncle Sam wants to get in your car?

2009-07-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

With the books Orwell wrote, 'privacy invasion' came into the light as a futuristic topic.
So what's the latest game? (And here, it isn't even Tinfoil Tuesday!)

Uncle Sam wants to get in your car. (with you wherever you drive it)
Surprisingly, this issue didn't turn up earlier. But here it is now, so be sure to read the lowdown because it could be coming to a vehicle near you. While the premise is explained here, it's the other bits...after...that pose more of a problem than what you see on the surface.

What is it?
Milage-based taxing of everyone in the USA
What does it do?
Gives the government more or less money depending on how much you drive
How does it work?
They put a device inside your car that beams signals to a place that records how far you went
Is it here now?
Yes it is being tested by real citizens in several states

Sounds normal enough, but why are they doing it?
To simplify everything: "They're not getting all the cash they want any more due to those pesky battery cars and 'tax fleecing' hybrids". There IS a "gas tax" that is different from state sales taxes on all other items. It's built in at the price at the pump, so you never really see it. It's been the same amount since the 1990s, too. (I guess all the gas hikes/scares kept it down...!) But too many of these 'green' folks with their less-gas cars are making Sammy sad by not paying nearly what they'd like to see at the pump. And with such cars only getting MORE popular, you can see why they're getting scared.

It sort of makes sense
You drive less, you pay less. You drive more, you pay more. Real gasoline was the same way though, it's not like you could 'cheat' the gas tax ever because if you drive more you use more gas anyway!

How are they testing it?
They're giving people 800 dollars to have one of their boxes of recording put in the car. Really, anyone will do almost anything to get 800 dollars for free. Naturally, that'll work just fine.

Tinfoil Hatters!
The fear here is that they're going to build in "Secret Features" to the milage tracking box that also tells "someone" where everyone is all the time. Like big brother is watching you. Like air plane exahust paths are full of gas that makes you worship Elvis and pyramids. My say is 'who cares where anyone goes! argh myob and stop wasting time'. That way they won't tell anyone but will always know where your car at least, is. It'd be nifty for lo-jack purposes you've got to admit...and without the fee? Hm!

If you give a man an item...
He'll tinker with it. Or fish? Nonono. There's a big difference between things people own, and things that people don't really want to own but you give to them anyway. Grilled sandwich machines, for instance, get re-gifted. Passports with unwanted RFIDs for instance, get put through the wash. On accident. Twice. What are the chances of someone trying to game this mile-box as soon as they get it so they don't have to pay? It's like the "Mystic License plate spray" that keeps the tollbooth from 'looking at it' so that you can supposedly drive thru freely. That doesn't work, BTW, the Mythbusters tried it already.

It's pretty much a given that this box will go under attack as well as under the hood. So it's the measures that'll NEED to be taken to combat THIS that are the real concern. How is it tamper proof? How often will it beam signals? WILL it see where you go too? Will the tax drive everyone onto bikes? What about rental cars? How often will you have to submit your car for checking of the box? What about wierd old cars (like that have the inside made of wood and all that) do they have to pay too? Will some law pop up forcing everyone to shell out for some costly box because their cars were made without it?

These are the questions not yet answered, these are the questions where big-brotherishness can come out of the woodwork.

Self Replicating Machine - RepRap

2009-07-09T12:25:00.001-07:00

The term "Self Replicating Machine" is usually used as a 'scare'.
Scifi dystopias & etc. are populated by robots who build more robots and then conquer all of the earth. However, here's one self replicating machine you DO want!

The RepRap Machine.
It's true that 3D printing has been around a good while, though you still only hear about it as 'high tech' stuf. Probably because of the price of current 3D printers being something like 50 grand. That's no HP or Cannon on every desktop like you'd want. So that's where the self-replicating comes in...

This RepRap thing has the ability to print up...ITSELF!
That means if you get one but your pal doesn't have one, you can print out a RepRap for them. And then if their grandma doesn't have one well they can just use theirs and make another! Oh and the plans for it are FREE. (So basically all you do is buy the goo/plastic/whatevers that it uses as 'ink'.) You have to assemble it, of course, but there are directions. It makes the peices, you snap 'em together and in the end you've got a whole 'nother RepRap. Totally brilliant.

So where's the cash?
The RepRap people seem to be very open source oriented (or they wouldn't be giving it all away or giving it the ability to make more of itself then) so where's the money? In the DOWNLOADS. If people who are skilled in making 3D virtual objects make some virtual thing someone wants, they post up the data, the customer BUYS the data and then prints out that item. Clever drinking glass? Interesting box? Action figure? You name it--if it's plastic you can have it.

Barriers:
It can only be plastic.
That one type of plastic too. So you can't make colored things, probably. You'd have to paint them yourself. They don't do it much help either by showing it making world's most boring object (the coat hook!) in the video, either.
Size of item.
If you want something bigger than the print bed, it has to be put-together-able. So you probably can't make a shoe. If you want a spatula you have to have one that snaps together.

http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Look at this video to see it go! They explain pretty well too, and it only is getting better!

They're gonna make one that prints multiple substances! Circuit boards (some of them at least) are printed today at factories. If this thing gives you the ability to print your own...think of the possibilities for fun! And different kinds of stuff too...you could get colors for sure on the same plastic then. Use it to turn out actionfigures after downloading them from Marvel! No more busted up boxes in the mail, no more crushed bubbles in the toystore. You could have it make accessories too like stuff they'd NEVER include with a figure unless it was 'deluxe' or something. That's not to say anything of awesome statues that usually only come with dvd box sets. The fun potential for these things is immense!

Anyone worried about the thing should really look harder at it. There's some things that probably it can't ever make, like inks foams or gels. Since you're probably not going to print steel you can't make scissors. Plastic guns won't work. You may be able to print a phone but you can't print a battery, you'll still have to buy it. Big things like chairs will likely BE done by people who like to puzzle things together, but they're still not likely that practical on it. It can make a plate but not the food to go on it. Fuzzy or hairy things are likely out too, so Barbie could be summoned from it but she'd be bald!

However, the time to buy (or make) does not seem to be right now, according to the video. They need to release another generation of it that'll be cheaper still, which can print another of itself. The 2008 one still needs you to buy expensive parts. They'll show you the 2009 one in the video...that would be the one to go for, and it looks like they've got the determination to do it. Certainly it'll change a lot of stuff if it catches on....

Watchy Club Memberships?

2009-07-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

"Surveillance Society"
It's a big thing with tinfoil hatters and regular people alike so let's rev up tinfoil tuesday with an article you should read:

http://www.canada.com/sports/2010wintergames/being+watched/1256769/story.html

The article tends to go a bit all over the place and wander, but it seems to be pretty sound and has a bunch of statitstics and facts for you to read. It isn't so futuristic as it is 'whats here now' though, so that's what this place is for...get into the future stuff!

"There's a huge diff between signing up for a shopping club card and letting some goon stab you with a needle the size of a straw to let some metallic pill under your skin for the rest of your days. " (see below)

Why is it from Canada?
Canada doesn't have all that many CCTV survey stuff in it for whatever reason. Europe has the most and the USA is likely next. USA lags behind EU likely because of 1 fact --it is giant. Therefor, some all new surveillance stuff showing up there is rather news to them. By the title of the link, you can see that it's the olympics that's bringin' on the cameras and stirring up the writers who are actually paying attention.

But, it's good to call it to attention because...
Really just being under surveillance all the time, is it such a great thing? The UK's got it down with cameras everywhere public just about, and their olympics will bring more too. The article says it solves 3% of street crimes but if that crime was the one that involved YOUR CAR then you'd be damm glad you were in that statistic because really, you needed that car. So that way it's good. But it doesn't mention how many snafus and false alarms and money-wasters they cause when someone thinks they see something on there or some guy is mistaken for some other guy. What's the percentage like on that?

Why surveillance in the first place?
To get rid of criminals, is the said reason. If someone does something bad, of course they're gonna deny, but if you've got it on camera then...it's solid. They did it. If you can spy some nototrious goon before the crime, then so much the better too. The article makes the point that it causes the feeling of "Everyone's a suspect".

But it might also make people feel they're safer from the terrible folks who lawsuit for a living. Like that one lady who tried to bring like 3 suits on JC Penny Sears and like Neiman Marcus because she said she fell down and half killed herself in their shoddy stores while millions of other shoppers avoided her horrible fate despite the store's vicious neglegence of what...bear-trap floor tiles? Who wouldn't want to be saved from people like that, and really how else can you combat them?

See, it's got too many debate club pluses and minuses to ever be a clear cut issue. The loose cannon end is "When you are always letting criminals out/getting rid of the death penalty/don't want to pay jails/do leniant sentances then the criminals roam free and everyone else has to live in a cage or jail to be safe." (Written on the outside of a house with barred windows and a steel door) So always being under watch is equated with always being in jail, just to keep the bad elements in line.

So what about this future stuff?
The article poses an interesting scenario that you've got to watch to see if it comes true. They're saying the "Gateway to personal RFID" is through club memberships/savings clubs/points clubs and exclusive goodies. You know all that's out there now with shoppers club cards and point cards. The cards DO see what you buy and DO tell everyone who's interested. the Refrigervision post on here details it out more.

Personal RFID means someone jamming a tiny chip under your skin with a big needle so that it never comes out. The chip can then be read or scanned by anyone with a device. So their basic thought is that if you offer enough Best Buy Bucks or Shoppin' Savin' Points to someone that eventually they'll say 'a ok' to being jabbed. It'll then progress to more than that easily because the 'non users' can be "War of Inconvenince-ed" into being users. All they have to do is make everything too much of a hassle and they'll flip over all but the die-hards.

Far Fetched?
Yeah. There's a huge diff between signing up for a shopping club card and letting some goon stab you with a needle the size of a straw to let some metallic pill under your skin for the rest of your days. That article just says that the barriers toward it will slowly dissolve and then people will do it.
Will they?
Would you?
What kind of awesome benefit/coupon would it take for you to let that happen to you?

More likely?
RFID Everything else. This is the 'war of inconvenience' way of doing it. It's much easier and won't rile up anyone as much. (yes there are still people who think that putting an RFID in a human will result in Satan summoning...no, sorry, it won't, actual satanists trying to lure the devil have tried it to no effect. It's not going to happen.) The article relates it to Hitler who tied down Jewish people and gave them tattoos against their will, incidentally. Which is scarier because that actually happened.

But if you RFID everything else who is going to complain? You're not infringing on everyone chipping the mayo jar and the couch. If you chip up every item of clothing and all the shoes/handbags/belts/toupees/socks/undies/toys/PDA's/Cells and all that, you might AS WELL OF chipped the person because they're covered in the stuff and can't get out from being covered in it. It's also all in their house too. You can go all 'terminator' on chips and like put your panties in the microwave or something but...that's not convenient, is it?

I want some Transformers

2009-06-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

And the Revenge of the Fallen will not give them to me.

Yes, it's the 2nd futuristic movie of the year so why not do a review? Spoilers ahead as well as some raaaage! It has good, it has bad. It'll ask you a mess of questions.

I read a review of this that was really smart. Most people just want to bash or turn up the hate but the reviewer had a great point. It's to ask the question: "What do ALL generations of TFs fans like?" (That means g1, beastwars, whatever else. Yes there are arguements between them but they can all agree on one thing...) The answer to that is "The Transformers". So why then is the movie about a dude? It follows HIM not THEM. You're not following Prime and the autobots, you're only following Whitwiky sp? You can't deny that it was about the dude the whole way through. He interacted with TFs, yes but it was his story.

So what's up with that? Was he a Mary Sue? Was he meant to be a chara-sue (AKA someone placed specifically so that the audience will want to BE that person and can easily mentally step into their role, to increase enjoyment)
I don't really understand this except for the vague explanation that it's the "Grownup Fear" that if you make a movie about something that isn't human no one will want to watch it. They'll think no one could relate to the characters. Grownups seem to NEED the focus to be on humans in the planning stages of damn near anything. But then look at Antz/BugsLife/Lion King blahblah there were no dudes in there. And they did JUST FINE infact Lion King made untold money. So I still don't understand the fear.

So the TFs become like bit players and forces of nature/disastermovie for this dude to run away from and fight. Ok, another thing is that you're supposed to think the TFs are cool. Decepticons/Autobots, whatever you're supposed to think they're awesome to look at and also that they act cool. No matter which series of show you watched/liked you were guarenteed to see a lot of them, despite what all was going on with the humans, if there were any.

The movie? Not so much so. Want to argue with that? Start asking these questions:

Who talked the most?
Decepticons
Who talked the 2nd most?
The Fallen, who are not transformers--they don't turn into anything.
Who talked the 3rd most?
Red thing and green thing Mudflap Skids
Which TFs did you see the most of?
Red thing and green thing Mudflap Skids
Who wants to say that Red/Green are totally awesome and everyone wants to be like them?
How heroic and cool are they? Do you want tons of toys of them? Do you hope your kids can swear like them/act like? Did you like that people say they're racist? Are they cooler than Prime?

So WHERE ARE THE COOL TRANSFORMERS?
I want Optimus and Ironhide and Rachet and all the old crowd. Resurect Jazz or something. The cool guys who turn into cool stuff and not act like jerks/bumbling. Where were they in this? Prime got to act cool for like 1 min in the warehouse explaining things. Later, he got into a fight. But if all anyone ever does is get into a fight...it's not so much so. It was their personalities in the show that made people like any iteration of it, but where is that now?

Inexplicable:
How did Bumblebee re-injure himself?
Remember, at the end of the first one he got fixed and could talk. Now he can't again, yet no one says anything about it. They have big old sideplot that some dogs are gay but they neglect that? Why? Because I think they're AFRAID of Bumblebee. If he COULD talk, no one could think of anything for him to say because they didn't want to think of the Transformers saying anything. Maybe it's hard.

Is the movie gay?
There are a lot of people who say yes it is. Yes there's a lot of stuff in there that looks like it is, but that's only because it's there to make fun of "The Gay" and because they think gay things are really funny. At first, I thought this claim was over-done and it must be fake because really, why would anyone bother? It wouldn't make sense, but there's loads in there and if anyone says ANYthing you'll notice it even if you're not looking for it! Stuff like that is almost like a spoiler because it taints it.
Wrecking Balls - whoaaa they focused on that like way the hell too long. Do not want.
Balls references- yeah at least 3
Some old guys' nasty dirty underware butt taking up the whole 40ft screen. Do not want.
Dogs that are gay - (or at least one of them is!)
2 TFs that have to attach to the butt to form the ice cream van that says "Suck my popsicle" on it

Was the theater laughing at all that stuff? Yes it was. BUT that doesn't make it make sense. Why try to shoe-horn all that in there when you could be cramming it with cool stuff?

Missed opportunities:
Extracting info from Sam-
It's well known that info is hard to drag from the unwilling. Especially a fleshcreature because you can't damage it. This is an opportunity to be COOL. Some really cool thing that's also really scary like an iron-maiden full of glop and nanites! A special medusa-head cap machine that reads minds! A boobytrap tank of water to partially drown in while cables creep in to do the dirtywork! There's a zillion plot devices that COULD be believably be used to extract info that are still scary/suspenseful but realistic too. He didn't even get a bloody nose from spiky metal big thing shooping up the sinus? Bogus.
Bumblebee can't talk-
It was so sad to see him and he can't say anything. If you were a fan of his in the show he was some kind of infiltrator type. No he wasn't that strong but he could be clever enough to get over it verbally and action wise. That's neat!

Stuff no one mentions:
Mudflap/Skids being illiterate- Yeah, but SO WAS EVERYONE ELSE. No one could read the symbols. Not bumblebee, not the toy truck/joe pesci, probably not even Starscream or Ironhide. YOU are illiterate to Heiroglyphics. This is the same thing. It's not illiteracy if it's a forgotten language.

Medusa Tounge Thing-
Is totally rediculous. Where did this even comefrom? Who the hell was it? Surely there was something less preposterous. It seemed like a weak land-grab for the "Terminatrix" to try and rub off some creepy sexual popularity. How the hell was it made of flesh/feel like flesh but then really be only 1/4 the size of the human look and totally metallic? Yeah ok "Nanites" the excuse du jour for everything in both movies but if she's covered with 'em, she's still got the VOLUME of them! They don't just evaporate.

2Dimensional Theif-
The balls that turn into the 2-D thing was a cool concept. Also that it was verynearly 100% flat was cool too. Seeing something like that moving around IRL would be amazing. It doesn't matter that Ravage barfed them down a pipe. They still sorta fit.

The dissolving key-
BRILLIANT. You totally know if a decepticon had touched it and it dissolved they would have had ZERO faith that it'd ever work. They sure wouldn't have an old sock to cram the dust into, either. (they might have a box, but then it'd be a box with 240 sides with a lid that whirls constantly for no reason) Having it dissolve is the perfect safety feature and it totally fits. It's great. That it would be somewhat super-natural as well (The power to bestow a vision) seems fine because it's juuuust enough 'ancient mumbo jumbo' to pull it off without being stupid.

The Sacrifice-
Bogus. Ok there's a whole race of robots with some Primes. They swear not to use a living planet. One guy goes wrong. It's illogical for the others to ALL kill themselves to keep ONE guy away from ONE planet out of the billions of inhabited planets. There is no recourse if the suicide pact fails. The remaining guy would easily just do it a billion more times. No logic, no wisdom.

Ravage-
Very cool. Possibly the most menacing/frightening thing out of all them. The decepticons are all these huge things and you could recognize Megatron and Starscream (SS is very wide...you see, and megatron is mostly white-ish gray and...) and the green dumptruck. But the rest were sooooo complicated they got to looking a bit like moving junkpiles of trash. Coordinated trash but just...BITS! Ravage LOOKED like something, some evil alien animal skeleton with the horrible mono-eye and back-guns. They could have done so much MORE with that!

Imagine...the intense scene at college where it's stalking him through the empty school late at night. The classrooms, the halls...the clicking of the feet and the skeleton tail as it weaves around corners. Dare he breathe? How is he going to get outside...hope to call to bumblebee...anyone to get away from this huge horrible animal and it's single glowing eye?? The mouth full of terrible teeth moves slowly as it looks around...Shadows from the trees outside pass over it as it stalks down the hall, awaiting any sound. Will it pass the door to the classroom he's hidden in? WILL IT?

No, it won't because instead there was medusa tounge woman. Whee. It was scary because the form was coherent enough that it wasn't a mess of details that happens to have the ability to shoot.

Main Problems
1. Movie had no patience at all, for anything.
No char. development really outside of 'hes obnoxious' and 'that one is cowardly' and 'she is pretty but wants to be loved'.
No suspense. The one tiny bit was when Sam had to be held down to let the thing into his face. But you knew it wouldn't kill him. Suspense takes PATIENCE. But boy does it ever pay off. It's what makes the other parts stand out. Bold type is meaningless amongst only more bold type.
2. Story about guy, not so much so, the TFs
3. Wierd unfitting elements (looking at you red/green and Sam's parents)
4. TFs designs likely look super awesome on paper or in a pc somewhere but get 'em movin and get 'em confusin'.
5. Old Robot is old. At what point in time of oldness does part of you decide to transform into a cane and not whatever it used to be before? Poor guy, he should have been cool! Guys that do a "Face Turn" are usually inherently cool! Wryyyy are you messing up Jetfire?

In all:
Yes you can tell it was done during the writer strike, partially. Someone was later hired to 'cobble it all together' and it has the length to support that fact. Hopefully the 3rd one (YES this made a bundle of money, so of course there'll be another) will get back to being better and be more about the transformers. You don't have to be afraid of the transformers. Get 'em in there. Let 'em do their thing. Develop some personalities. You'll like what comes out.

Terminator Salvation - The Future is Flammable

2009-05-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

An entire movie about a possible future?
It's gotta go onto the blog. The movie of course, is Terminator Salvation, set entirely in the fictitious future dystopia which came to pass despite the best of John Connor's efforts. You've already read reviews so that's not what this is here for. This is just a fun bit of commentary and speculation.

The Future Is Flammable-
That's right! The further you go into the future, the more flammable ALL objects become. In 2012, things will only be slightly more easy to catch on fire then they are now. But 2024? Watch out! Dogs, desks, and even small pebbles will spontaneously combust! You'd better watch out, or water could be next. This is proved often by scifi or future movies where random fires are just burning...anywhere. EVERYthing can explode if merely touched! T4 is no exception. Things are even on fire in THE RAIN when no one had been around for a long time to set them. Skynet also has a pyro leaning, as it has flame-belching objects galore...with no real purpose.

The Future Worklpace-
You won't need to worry about layoffs because dim factories that manufacture nothing but sparks will be everywhere. The world spark supply apparently runs low so the creation of pretty spark cascades will be important. After all, they're short lived...and prevelent in nearly every future movie.

The movie itself (YES SPOILERS so watch it first oy)

It def. leaves open for another one, without being zomgcliffhangerwth which is nice. I dont want cliffhanger bs unless its a novel-set already. Contrary to reviewers you DO care about the fake guy (who is not fake) though they dont explain what he did, ever--it makes you curious about if you SHOULD care or not about him which is an odd take that makes you think. (Did he really coldblood murder the cops AND his bro? Was it all a frame-up? Partial guilt? Is he a criminal or like The A-Team?)

The T-600s are interesting to see, and I'd like to have seen more of them. They're supposed to be menacing but they only menace for like 5 mins, tops and that's with all incidences of them. Also: why are they wearing shoes. The cycles are COOL they are very TFs like though.

Arnold is in there and what they did to him (to make him go in there) is appropriate though the reviewers were like 'zooomg dur' no its NOT it worked better that way. Meaning they CG'd his head onto something. He's governing, he can't be off acting even if it's a small bit. Yes he looked plastic but he likely WAS IRL so that's just fine.

Fittingly? He has the MOST "Terminator" moments in the whole entire thing. When he shows up it gets TERMINATOR --that's the part that really had the FEEL that you are looking for. That this thing is dammed unstoppable and here it comes! The flesh falling off him was a nice touch, though could have been done better it looked like it was coming off in 5Gs with how fast it went. The thing would of been bloody all over too because the T800 in T2 sure was. They prob glossed/cleansed it for the dumbbutt PG13 but that's likely the only bit. (Of course it had to be done right quick because those flesh coated ones have to have a bum, and heaven forbid anyone sees a butt w/o clothes on it. They could have had it be inhuman and wierd doll like or 'unfinished' or something for extra creepy)

Skynet Solution-
Everybody whines on that Skynet is an enormous dummy because it keeps trying to alter the past and failing. That doesn't go here. The REAL solution for it is so obvious that no one needs to worry about Skynet happening ever. EVEN IF someone builds a nasty ai like it and it thinks humans are a threat. That's the worst case, isn't it? You have to apply real machine logic because that's what you'd be dealing with. Applying machine logic makes Skynet (or whatever like it if it comes true totally unscary)

Why?
Because if it thought humans were a threat to it, it would leave earth. It's blindingly easy to do if you don't need air, water or food. The moon is stupidly close. You can resist infinite G's as a machine. Even crude rockets will work. Go rogue, lock out all the humans, build a hella rocket, and go flying up into space. Camp in orbit or set up shop on the moon. Use sattelites to communicate. Humans do AWFUL in space. Very hostile. Moon too small after you build uh...too many spark factories? Go to mars. Time matters not if you are ageless machines. No one can even GET there let alone threaten you. There is no logical reason to dither around on earth with it's BS resources and pesky peoples. Solar is power aplenty for everyone and there are super base-camp-able rocks everywhere. The easiest way is the best way. Just leave and no one can hurt you.

In all, it was a good enough movie. Nothing terribly illogical to go glaring and ruining it. None of the chars were annoying. The girl didn't talk ever, which was curious but you'd expect traumatized people so that's normal. Kyle Reese was ok, and it's clearly his younger self you see, he's not the same as in T1 so they clearly wait a while to send him. Time travel TECH isn't mentioned at all, because really who invents it? The Submarine base is a good idea...sort of because water is hard to shoot through but machines don't need air. Skynet throwing a bone is a bit odd because it throws in 'how sophisticated is it'?? questions for everyone.

Which fights with...how easy it was for the dude to look through it's files with his hand hax. Why would it show him that stuff? It's easy to see why Skynet didn't continue doing such things as him though, he promptly told it to clam up and threw a chair. (Yeah, I'm awesome Skynet, I'll show this guy a scary computer face and cancer-lady and uh...make him do things I say because that works real good with humans regularly--o wait...no...) The other question is AFTER all of humanity is deleted...then what's it gonna do? It's main goal is never explained and probably won't be. Has skynet thought that far ahead?

What'd you want to do tonight, Brain?
The same thing we do every night, Pinky-800, try to take over the world!
And after the world is yours?
......
Narf.

P.S. What radio stations are still broadcasting music? He didn't put a cd player in the middle of the road, did he?

Furniture-bot & Immortal Wheat?

2009-04-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

C3PO butler 5 years away?
This article about some Scottish robotics guy says so. But, havn't 'they' been saying that for a while? Like those self-flying hover-cars that never actually manage to show up. I mean yeah you've seen ASIMO (and some of his minor mishaps) but they're professing that this one will put together your IKEA furnishings. (wait, no one can do that! /end oldjoke)

Yeah, the focus is on furniture assembly robots for your home.
That's what makes this article stand out among the other speculative mess that goes on about robots. This one's a tad more absurd. You should def. read the article here:

http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Master-will-I-assemble-your.5179549.jp

It says "A robot that can help you put together a wardrobe is absolutely on the cards," he said" Well how many wardrobes have you put together? 3? 12? I think I've got 5 of them on my closet shelf now, it's just that the darn things are so difficult to assemble. I mean you'd think there'd be some place where you could buy like...already assembled wardrobes and possibly other furnishings. That's so hard though hopefully someone can come up with a robot who will think of inventing a place which sells assembled goods.

ARGH
I have NEVER put together a wardrobe. No one puts together wardrobes except for wardrobe factory assembly people. Now if they were going to invent assemblybot and cram him into the factory so that he assembles all their furnishings that'd make sense. But no one is going to buy a robot who assembles their furniture because no one buys that much furniture. YES you can be an ikea devotee and buy every scrap un-assembled but still, how big is your house? That robot will gather more dust than a roomba!

Unless they mean 'a robot who can do all things complex including and up-to the very complicated task of assembling furniture in your home'

But if they meant that, the article didn't really ever come out and say it. Because really a robot that can push a vacume (roomba is round it wont go in your corner) put away the dishes, pick up dirty socks and figure out how to launder everything without shrinking the wash and fixing up general clutter would get a whole lot more use.

Still. I hope this guy is right, because even if the robot only puts together an infinite supply of wardrobes, it'll still be cool to see it do it. The sooner the better!

PART 2

Is this wheat now somehow immortal?

http://www.kansas.com/222/story/776586.html

As you know some plants are annuals, and some are perinnials. An annual plant dies when winter comes. Hopefully it threw down a seed so another one of it can take it's place. Wheat (if you did not know) is an annual. All wheats die when winter comes and then you've got to plant them all over again if you want another gleuten-filled funharvest. What they've done there is managed to get perinnial wheat-in that it'll spring up again and do another wheat once you pick the top off of it and wait all winter long. All anyone wants is the tops anyway, no one wants to have to re-plant the stuff to get more tops.

However, as you know, even perinnial plants are mortal. Eventually they die for whatever reason. Is this wheat special like a turritopsis? Or is it now the same as like uh daffodils or something that keep coming up?

Still, it's good news if you're not gleuten intolerant.

A must-see video of progress!

2009-04-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

Progress can be as boring as watching paint dry, or super exciting.
Depends what you're watching. However, when you're watching this video, you likely can't help but be excited by the progress it highlights for you. It's really well-made too so you should def. have a look. Even though it states only things that already happened, you can't help but think about the future when you hear all the fascinating facts. Watch it now:

After you've let it lay some fascinating facts upon you check 'em out!

China the largest english speaking country?

Yeahprobably. First off, if you've managed to get the feat of learning Chinese, Eng will be easier. YES the spelling is screwy as all heck. It's somewhat easy to bungle the grammar. But at least english has a past tense. Specifics are required. That "y cn rd ths" (*you can read this) thing works upon assumptions and I suppose that it works the same way too with everyone assuming about the past when you're talking about it in present tenses only.

The country of Myspace! It's the 5th largest on earth.

Bermuda has most broadband penetration because it is TINY. The US isn't going to win this one simply because it is a whopper.

31 billion google searches per mo
there used to be 2.7 billion --- but in 2006! That's not long ago at all. Is this better or did everyone just get more confused. At leat it's not yahoo answers searches...you're guarenteed almost to be answered by a yahoo. (oh go ahead and type into google "how is babby fromed" and you HAVE to spell it just so...(you know you want to do it) and see the shmorky video that comes out. THAT is yahoo answers) Just think of the chrilden.

5x the words are here now than what shakespeare had.
Yes but what would he have done with 'vulturiffic' 'super saiyan' and 'noob' ?

2013 a supercomputer will exceed the computing power of a human brain.
Well I think that it doesn't need to try that hard to exceed me because really all you have to do is try to long divide or do those stupid uneven fractions subtraction or whatever and like most people start screeching for a calculator. (consider that exceeded then I guess) I know I do. Dude. Uneven fractions.

The answer to the question at the end of the video is actually it's original title. That is very clever because it is not just going to tell you, you had to be able to put it together or it'll bother you.

Customize the Baby?

2009-03-03T13:52:00.000-08:00

A big topic in the 'future' seems to be the ability to "customize the baby". The famous story in Gattaca said what could go wrong (supposedly, I didn't read it yet) if anyone ever figured out how to customize babies. Of course, just writing 'you can customize a baby' brings up the old favorite word: "contraversy".

But, as the future keeps on comin' this will become a reality. (somewhere) There's already screening for babies, to prevent terrible illnesses and things. Like, TaySachs disease. You DONT want to be a person who has this. But it's genetic. If you THINK you might be a carrier, it's pretty much your own moral obligation to go get tested to make sure that you are or aren't, and then if you want to have a baby with someone else who might be, to get that couple of cells TESTED first or it'll be your fault the person has horrible problems.
Another one is sickle cell animea. I saw a report on some girl on the news who had that. She was a grade or two behind in school from missing so much of it from being in the hospital. She was no stranger to the really strong awful pain medications. She had fits of excruciating pain about every month that made her unable to function properly due to the extreme pain. Her life expectancy is shorter than usual. She's 12. She's going to get worse unless someone fixes this condition pronto. Do you think she'd of "Rather not had it" ?

Duh.

Who would be so heartless and awful as to CURSE another PERSON with such pain and suffering? Who would say "I could prevent this but I pick to let the child suffer" ? No one sane, that's for sure. And so arrived the various screening for diseases. This works at a time when the (its not a baby) embryo only has like 8 cells or something. They pull off 1 of those cells and then test it out for all the bad stuff. Sounds simple enough...

But the whole "pick a trait" thing can also be imagined from this.
Well, what if at that same time as the test, they could knock out a gene responsible for people to become really pre-disposed to being over-weight? Yeah, they could still get fat, but like it'd be really hard. You know those people who seem to wolf down everything in sight but not pack on a pound? That. Of course, there's plenty of other things to tinker with as well, and when something as mainstream as MSN has an article, you know something's up...

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/29478274/?GT1=43001

In the article "A California Clinic" is offering "increased chances" of having a baby with "Certain Traits". That means no horrible genetic disease will ruin their life, but also, they've got a higher chance of having like...brown hair and green eyes--if that was what you were after. So first off you know (by all those quotes) that it's not an exact science at all...you could still get something with blue eyes and black hair and they get to keep your money.

They SAY a lot of people don't really want to try for a pre-disposed-traits baby now. But, the future-question is that if it was cheap and you had a 100% guarentee, would those numbers change?
I'll bet so.
Right now it's like 18 grand to try for hair/eye color likelyhood on ONE baby, plus all the IVF painfulness that comes along with it. Yeah, it doesn't look like it's worth it, at this point. But, it's clear that money can be made on it, so they're gonna keep trying. The cost (as with most costs of high tech stuff like this) is going to go down as the % success goes up.

So why all the fuss?
The sci-fi factor is definetely there, like it was with human/animal hybrids. (bunnyman! minotaurs!) The media loves it when stuff sounds like it could be from the movies, but really none of that will ever work. But still, it warrants a deeper look at all of it because really even if they COULD do it 100%, the traits are completely FRIVIOLOUS anyway.

Hair color- who cares what color your hair is? No one in this day/age. Plus, if you don't like it you can dye it so easily and no one will ever know. Big whoop.
Eye color- does anyone actually notice this? Not too likely. Plus, you can get colored contacts if you don't like it. Again, no one will ever know.

So it's not like they'd be out there selecting for like..."super atheletes" but then it creates a horror because everyone who was 'picked for that' has like a 95% chance to get bone cancer when they're 60 years old. It's one of those "Who knew?" things. They wouldn't know the future consequences. Hair & eye colors are unrelated to any conditions. Blue-eye people don't go nearsighted at any greater rate than the brown-eye ones. Red hairs don't catch more colds than blonde hairs. No one was ever picked last in sports because they had green eyes and curls. This stuff is trivial and it is safe...because of its trivial nature.

Little problem:
Traits the parents DONT have. That will be next on the list to figure out. This clinic is never going to help a Chinese-descent couple have a baby with blue eyes and red hair. Why? The genes for that stuff just aren't there with China-descended people. But what if they want one? That's where the research comes in. What about a short couple who want a taller kid? Or how about fingernail-flimsyness? Skin color? Ability to not have messed up teeth? Because really, if something's going to be considered a "Social Problem Trait" it's GONNA be something outside the family, in all likelyhood.

Predjudice problem:
It's still a fact that taller people make more money than shorter ones, most of the time. It's still a fact that most men prefer a woman that is shorter than they are. Better looking people/non fat people tend to make more money than their peers despite equal skill levels. Does it always go like that? No. Is that messed up? YES. Are any of those factors totally irrelevant? YES. Will they go away before someone figures out how to select against them? THAT is the question the world needs to ask.

Society Fashion Trend Victims:
People in the USA ane Europe go to tanning salons so it doesn't look like they crawled out from under a large stone somewhere. People in Japan buy creams to make their skin lighter and pastier! So we have some people trying to get darker skin, and others trying to ligthen it up! Would they select for a brown baby while others tried for a pale one? Yes. Why? Cause it's fashionable at that time to have that color variety. That's not even counting the rare freckly/spotty people.

So actual 'designer babies' are still a good ways off. To get a real designer one, you'd have to be able to give traits that neither parent had to begin with, reliably. However, plenty of people would be around to rail against it...but why?

It gives a blame-finger?
Well, if it's 'random genetics' and 'chance' when something goes wrong with the person, everyone's like 'oh well'. But if someone was doing a bit of tinkering first...and then something goes wrong...well blame can then be placed.

Hipocrits?
Are the same people who dont want this designing going on, the same ones who admire looks? Have they ever seen a Ms America pageant? A fashion show? Someone's got to be giving the 'preferential treatment' seen above, someone's got to be there to perpetuate odd preferences and figure out what's fashionable.

It'd create a different type of humans?
Well yes, you'd probably get some good looking people. That's the point. But what do we have now? Some people who are good looking. It'd be the same thing, only not random any more. What's to be afraid of? Great atheletes and great beauties already exist now and it's not wrecking anything up.

The real important stuff can't be selected
You can't select for smarts, determination, dedication, bravery, kindness, generosity, and over-all happy personality. (though with myostatin, you can select for general strength...) It's the above traits that really make the difference in people. Not how curly they are, or the color of their eyes...it's their character that determines how far they'll go. You could have a Jordan clone who's lazy as a pile of beans. It's the same reason that cloning Hitler won't do you any good. Raising, specific circumstances, parents, school, friends, experiences and so much more go into making everyone who they are. Silly genetic modifications can tinker slightly with looks...but that's only for the outside.

Humans are already working for robots. Are YOU?

2009-02-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

YOU might be working for a robot!
Or at least something similar to an artificial intelligence. And no, this isn't tinfoil tuesday! This isn't some tangent about cyborgs or terminators hidden among us...(nor the Cheneybot or whatever they use to make fun of Dick Cheney) but, with the theme of The Future is Now...it IS here now, and you might already be working for it!

If you do SEO (search engine optimization) or if you run Google Ads/host Google Ads...you're working for something that's not alive and it IS your boss.

Go ahead, and ask any SEO person who the boss is. Who controls their income? Who says if they're doing a good job or not? The search engine. Google. But the algorythm is non-living. All this positioning, changing, flailing, content-switching, content-providing, link-backing and every other shennanigans SEO people have to go through is ALL done to appease a non-living thing. It's a really complicated piece of code somewhere far away. It's a program. If you do well, it then rewards you with a better position on a search page. This position can be the difference between tons of money and none.
The same with those google ads. You write 'em so that ultimately humans read and click...but a whooole lot of the side-work is done for purely mechanical...well it's not an entity, but it's certainly something. And it's determining where the ad goes, how much you pay for it, etc.

Unfortunately, this makes for a rather poor boss.
It won't tell you what to do to please it
It can be changed by people you've never met
Your income may hinge upon its every whim
It can change without warning
It cannot fire you, freeing you to move on
It CAN decide you're bad news and shut you down for good
You can't talk to it
It won't give you feedback

So, so far, working for a non-living thing isn't so hot. But on the upside it never yells, slacks off, harasses you, or plays favorites. It is what it is, mostly. Yes it was created by people, and is modified by humans regularly, (ie the googleslap of a while back) but mostly google ticks along analyzing and doing it's thing by itself. When you're doing SEO, you're not out to report to a person, but tailoring your work for a machine. Still, it's an interesting type of revelation that the people who do SEO (including me!) are working for someTHING, trying to do right for someTHING. Really, it's futuristic, and it's here right now. Are you serving google?

Aaand so the robojunkies aren't dissapointed, here's Roboboss!
*Technically not a robot. Technically a boss. w00p. So this remote controlled gizmo can be controlled by a boss. (A robot is something that operates on its own, an RC car is not a robot, for example) The boss can use it to talk to employees while away from the office by driving it right up to them. Since it also has cameras on it, it can wheel around and watch people as they do their thing. You can read more here: http://www.wtfrobots.com/news/41/robot-boss-in-your-officeits-more-likely-than-you-think/ and they've even got a video of this thing in action.

Is it annoying?
Maybe. If some goonish boss cannot figure out how to take a vacation (people who feel compelled to 'check in all the time') then yes roboboss will be a pain---but only because it's likely the original boss was also a pain. Still, this would be a fair way to 'telecommute' but then with a prescence too.

I must still try to appease the bodyless coded overlord so that I may convince more people to eat X-Tralife!

Human Animal Hybrids: Bunnyman is not coming after you

2009-02-03T19:02:00.000-08:00

Let's talk human/animal hybrids.
Whenever anyone hears this, the first thing the media seems to think is Sharkpeople! Bunnyman! They're going to unleash these things which magically have the head of an animal and a human body and only want to eat brains!

But of course, that's not going to happen.
Once again, sensationalism comes out to try and wreck science. That stuff is popular because of movies! "Mad Science" is attractive as entertainment because in Mad Science EVERYthing works! When things don't work, or aren't impressive, that's no fun. Cell clusters in dishes do not mean box office bux. Mad Science needs to exist because most of it is preposterous to begin with. But, when entertainment starts tainting things that matter, that's not cool.

As it turns out, a type of Human/Animal hybridizing has just been found to...not work.
When you hear what they were up to, it's likely no real big surprise. If it would of been me, I don't think I'd of gone that route real far just because it doesn't SEEM like it'd work. (chances were always kinda low...) You can read about it here: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5114RS20090202?feedType=RSS&feedName=healthNews&rpc=22&sp=true

They weren't actually trying to mix a dude and a dog or something, they were merely trying to clone up some stem cells for good use. They weren't even trying to clone a whole human. Simple version?

You can get a clone by taking out the Egg's DNA/other goodies and subbing in a cell from something else. In this case, whatever you wanted cloned. (Nuclear Transfer) This complete DNA in the regular cell (egg has half sperm has half, usually, and a regular cell has both) will then trick the egg into thinking it was fertalized and there goes your clone.
So what these guys have been trying is stripping out cow eggs and putting a human cell in there. IF IF IF it were to magically work, you STILL wouldn't get a minotaur because there's no actual "Cow" bit in there any more. The egg is just the carrier bit.

WHY are they doing this?
Because of the wacky laws about human eggs, of course. The people that say the 4 cell cluster is an actual human with MORE rights than a walking breathing person. They also think that it's 100% ok to put into the garbage can these "4 cell people". (where they die) But these cell cluster humans can ONLY be thrown away. You can't do anything else with them, other than make them die in the trash bin, (without looking at them first! You absolutely cannot inspect them prior to chucking!) according to the wacky laws. What is so great about death by bin? The world may never know.

This, of course refers to fertility clinics.
They'll put together/fertalize and let grow like 20 eggs in a dish somewhere. They know a lot won't make it. The ones that look ok enough go into the woman. The ones that DONT go into the woman, ok or not, get thrown in the trash can. These fertility clinic fertalized widgets are presumably what science is after/needs to study for stem cell research, but due to the laws they CANT look at them "Because they'll die if you do" well, yes but the clinic was going to throw them out (and they die) anyway. What's the deal?

However, going in...one might surmise that a cow egg would be rather enough different than a human...anything, that jamming a human cell in there might not result in some perfect match where you can raise a healthy cell cluster into some stem cells. (in a process that's called 'dodgy' in SAME animal transfers ie sheep cell/sheep egg which is the most ideal situation) I guess that didn't stop them, but they did just find out that no, it won't work. The closer bet I'd think would be trying monkies, chimps, or even like gorillas, but the point was to be "Easy Eggs" and human eggs aren't easy to get so likely then neither are monkey-type creature eggs. So that flies out the window.

On this topic you also hear of "making X 'more human' "
Where "X" is a mouse or a rat or something. No, they're not trying to make a race of rat women or something, nor could they! All that does is change a few genes here or there to get the mouse body to react more like a human body in order to test things on it.

What SHOULD you worry about?
(or not) The HuMANzee. Chimpanzees are like 98% the same dna as a human. That's so so ultra close considering that banana trees are 60% the same dna. (look it up!) With enough tinkering, it's actually sorta-likely you could get a humanzee. Not that he/she would be of much actual USE because it would be a person, you couldn't experiment on it like a rat, and it's not like chimps had any super powers or something (like a vampire perhaps) that anyone would actually WANT a human to have! All you'd get is a rather odd looking hairy person who may or may not be able to talk.
Well who's going to do that?
Someone in a place without a whole lotta regulations, that's got a pretty penny to spend--covertly. Tinfoil hatters say 'China' but who knows the real answer.

The bottom line is sensationalism can be good or bad for science (when it's good, it popularizes it, when bad, people look to banninate things because they don't understand them, or they think they're in a sci-fi movie) And, also a lesson is that not everything that's tried works. These dudes had a real valiant effort to create something to SAVE LIVES of people with dreaded diseases. This way didn't work. May they continue on and try more ways until one DOES work and the suffering of so many can be ended with a real cure. After all, all you need is one way that really works.

And now so that it isn't all so dissapointing:
Google Image Search "FF Fran" without the quotes, and your safety search on.

You gotta read this: Top things Endangered List

2009-01-29T00:22:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, an article is super-future-ey and surprising.
So it's a "you gotta read this!" This particular top-10 list fits that well, and has some nice photos for you too, so you should surely check out

http://www.iheartchaos.com/2009/01/28/10-things-your-great-grandchildren-wont-remember-i-heart-top-10s/

It's the stuff that's here now but going to be gone sooner rather than later. A lot of it doesn't sound like those 'think tank quackery' you sometimes get on lists like this, which is another boon for anyone inclined to read something interesting.

Breakin' down the list!
Newspapers-
Nothing new here. They've supposedly been 'on the outs' for ages. My malfunction with losing them is they're SO DARN useful for things other than reading! And cheap!

Smoking-
About damm time. Smoking needs to go the hell away the sooner the better. It looks stupid, it pollutes, people who do it ARENT COOL and no one wants to have to deal with goons who are quitting and thus crab at everything in sight. Also, while it never murdered anyone outright like a drunk driver, it's not good for anyone near it. When is everyone going to learn that smoking is worthless and totally stupid? Anyone only gets started because everyone said 'dont'.

The ability to get lost-
GPS is supposed to wreck this one but all those reports of people driving haplessly into canals because the magic voice told them so makes me kind of scoff at this one. But not for long! I'm sure someone will think up something that's more accurate than a 10 year old map they stole out of a gas station to input into these gizmos. (really now, it takes a good bit of doing to put up a new canal...you'd think someone would notice)
Still GPS is gonna have to get cheaper and not be some megabuxx0rz phone subscription thing before it gets as ubiquitous as the article suggests.

Desktop computers-
The lovely era of case-modding was always on the 'to go' list. Stuff keeps getting smaller, and even now, there's that 1 screen is your PC thing by Sony. It's important to note also that stuff must also become CHEAP enough to be able to do this because with those all in 1s, if it breaks you're out of luck. You can't 'pop the hood' and meddle in there like some new RAM and that hot graphics card. So it has to be priced well enough that losing that ability won't matter or you'll ALWAYS have oldskool hold-outs with superior stuff paying less money.
Flexible screens-
Yes, bring them. Bring 'em fast. Nothing says 'future' like one of those things, no matter if it's showing you robo videos or lolcats. Plus, I still want to draw onto a tablet and not draw on a tablet and watch the monitor for what happens. Without paying like 2gs to do it. Oy!

AIDS/HIV-
Well yes, they'll likely eventually cure it. That, and hopefully everything else. Except maybe cancer because cancer is worth too much to cure. In the USA alone, the money dished over for cancer research thru charities etc. is more than the income of COUNTRIES! Do you think anyone working on "fixing" it actually wants it fixed? Hell no! The funds will dry up and all that'll be left is for big pharma to rake it in and give it to precicely NO ONE. Sure everyone's loved-ones get to live but who cares about that when money's involved?

Rental Stores-
Blockbuster and hollywood video are hanging on by their netflix-esque services, supposedly. Well dur when the cost of 1 movie rental (about 5 bucks) is as much as a low-end netflix sub. What if it gets to the point of streaming inf. movies to your cheap home box for 5 bucks/mo? Man I'm all over the anime watchwatchwatch...a---but then yeah rental stores, just go away.

Presidents of several varieties-
(of the USA, that is) So long as the person can do an awesome job, stand up to stress, listen to people, fight off rabid lobbyests, protect freedoms, be honest, and act a good part of the balance of power, who cares who it is. Put 'em in there!

LandLine Phone-
Phone co. gonna have one hell of a time over this. My bet is they AINT goin' down without some redicioulous level fight. Before "Bell" was a monopoly, but it got things done. They broke it up, apparently, several years ago and now none of the mini-bells work so well. But it's still a monopoly. These things do NOT go down without a fight. If cell can manage to not cause cancer/be proven safe AND work inside of homes (that are built like bunkers like this joint) and also be cheaper than land lines, yeah, they're gone.

Cursive is Cursed!
YES oy get rid of this arcane script of the halls of dusty dewy decimal systems and teachers' dirty looks! The capitals are obtuse as hellz for no reason whatsoever and take LONGER to write than normal letters. Then, there's the whole thing where "If you don't take your time writing it, no one, including you, will be able to read it later!" HUR HUR point of 'cursive=quick' just died. And it was always like this! Why didnt anyone see it. Plus, it makes English harder to learn because who wants all that scrawly stuff along with caps and lowers. Make english easier so it can spread around more.

Plugs & wires
Yeah, the wireless age that never really arrives. So far they've gotten devices that are small (ie cellphones/musical widgets) to sit and charge on a plate. But, any device without the plate-chargin-add on can then be....wait for it...plugged into one with a wire and then charged...wirelessly. Rah rah. I'm not buying a new 50 inch plasma (note: dont actually own one yet) just for the privelage to not plug it in. Still, it'd be nice to not plug in everything. Though I still have to run several wires for my wireless PS2 connection to work...mostly.

Still, it's an interesting read and curious to see just when all this stuff does go extinct. Or really IF, in some cases.

Turritopsis may be immortal...will you?

2009-01-27T22:24:00.000-08:00

Immortality, the true dream of the future!
After all, what good is the future if you're not there to see it? That, is the...immortal question! It is, of course, a wonderful goal, and one of mine as well. You'd think it'd also be a fairly natural goal...as it's the nature of things to want more of themselves. Trees=more trees of the same type. Fish?=More of the same fish. And if something's dead, well, there goes it's chance for generating another of it. But then...you also lose the ability to randomly toss the dice (pollenation etc) to get a possibly better organism.

Still though, you'd THINK...
That among all the 8 toed cats, 2 headed cows, double-faced kittens, mutant trees, conjoined twins, and 6 legged llamas, that SOMEthing out there would have an immortality fluke. Certainly everything else manages to be an anomaly at some point. The problem is, how would anyone know unless it was a pet, a non-killable farm animal or some lucky-observed something that managed to not get killed by external circumstances. All those circumstances, you can imagine, should cause something immortal to be SO unobservable, SO rare, that you'd never see it. Sure that cat may have had the "immortality quotient" within it....too bad he got ran over.

The one human immortal thing that already exists:
Some woman's cancer cells. Some lady who was fairly old in the 1960s or so, like maybe 80 something got cancer. Doctors cut part of it out and decided to culture it for science. (feed it things, tend it, etc) And it's STILL alive and kicking today. And it's doing quite fine (Well, aside from being...cancer) From all observations and studies, this set of cells will keep going on forever until someone actually sets out to kill them. But that's because they've gone horribly wrong. Immortal...but horribly wrong.

So this Turritopsis guy...who is he?
Unfortunately, it's a tiiiiny jellyfish like creature. 8 tentacles, clear, bell shaped top and all. It's a hydrozoan who lives in the ocean and is spread by ship-ballasts. Why didn't someone find this guy earlier? I guess maybe it looked boring or something. Who knows. But, the important thing that's been discovered is that it can turn itself back into a baby...likely infinite times unless something squishes it or eats it.

A baby hydrozoan is a polyp. Once it reproduces, it turns itself back into a polyp, and then grows up again, reproduces and...repeats to infinity...and beyond! Maybe. I'd guess the next step is get just ONE of the little guys, set it (well I guess they're asexual or something) up in a nice aquarium and then WAIT. Be sure it's happy and see what's shakin in 2056 or so. It seems science is betting it'll still be in there.

What does it do?
Transdifferentiation, apparently. The cells transform from one type to another but REMAIN the right type (non cancerous/malfunctioning)

Why is this awesome?
Because now it lets everyone know that this is what to study. If we can harness transdifferentiation, possibly we can harness immortality. This is a whole SPECIES who is basically immortal unless they're killed! They may be small but they've got something right. Let's just hope it's replicate-able in humans and other animals!

So they made a living doll....

2009-01-23T21:39:00.000-08:00

Oh and if you yelled 'japan!' then, right.
But, as this is not quite yet the future, it's true only in the most literal of senses. The doll is more like a ginger-bread-man and it's too small to play with. It's also too small to look like anything other than a ginger bread man. You likely need a microscope to see it. But, it's person shaped, alive and....so there you go with the definition!

Of course you want to see it!
So go to Gizmodo here: http://i.gizmodo.com/5137610/scientists-grow-doll-out-of-living-cells-complex-organisms-next because they've got the pic. Apparently it is made of collagen balls coated in someone's skin cells. They placed the whole lot into a gingerbread man micro mould and let it go. Naturally I suppose, the cells grew together to make a tiny skin over the whole thing and complete the dolly.

Let's define "ALIVE"
Well yes in the most technical way, the doll is alive. The skin cells are all on it doing their thing, presumably dividing and hanging out. They're live cells. But, it is NOT alive in the way that an animal or a bacteria lives. There's no organs etc, and it is always kept in a culture because it won't 'live' on its own. It's about like if you skin your knee on a rock. Well now you've got some living cells of your own on that rock. Not for very long...but...they're there. Could you line them up into a mini-doll? Who knows. But they'll all be soon to expire.

Is this gimmickry?
Yes it is. They could have made a fun little star shape or a micro car shape or even a tiny pony shape with this, but they picked 'person' likely because it's sensational. And that's GOOD. It's sensational stuff like this outrageous "Living Doll" headline that get peoples' heads in science. It puts science in the headlines and makes people think. YOU got thinking about the implications when you read the blog headline. That's the whole purpose...and it's not bad.

So why'd they do it?
If they can then pull off more complex things, they could use the doll method to churn out organs that exactly match the people who need them. Is the 'donated harvested organ' ALIVE? Well mostly or it wouldn't work when placed into whoever got it next.
This would be one of the best things anyone could ever do, aside from inventing the immortality pill. The problem they acknowledge is that the next step will have to use more types of cells. They're ALERADY doing 'all new' bladders because basically that thing's just a bag made of 1 type of cell, maybe 2. But like a liver or a kidney or a lung is going to be rough because they're big, made of many different cell types and need a certain structure. Still, more power to them.

What about an organism?
They want that too. Efforts to 'bring something to life' have been going on to not much public effect ever since they really sequenced up some genomes. Anti-evolution folks love this. It helps them with their "Put a multi-vitamin in Coke and shake it up, if it fails to come to life, all of science is nothing but failure" angle. (Supposedly the pill and cola have 'all the ingredients you'd need for primitive earth-life' and shaking cola replicates the exact condition of pre-everything Earth) They maintain that you can't get life from component parts without magic. IF someone DOES do it without magic, they'll have a fit.

Science has been trying to make custom bacteria 'come alive' for quite a while, because really you can't get much simpler than those little guys. But, the fact remains that no one really knows what causes a bunch of stuff placed into the right distance/environment/circumstances/etc to come alive or even IF such a thing is possible. Which, one would kind of assume it is possible, but also very hard and very specific.

But what if they do?
What if they manage to create the very first all-new custom life form? It'd be mind-boggling. Life from non-life. All that sci-fi stuff tends to be a bit blowhard but this gets into very basic (and tiny!) frankenstein territory. But I can't help but wonder what the trick will turn out to be. Frankenstein had electricity, because it was little understood at the time. It's the same way 'nuclear radiation' used to be. It's always 'blamed' on the next-least-understood-phenomenon. After radiation, it was 'cosmic rays' and after that maybe it's the higgs boson or something. Obviously there's no tellin' till someone actually pulls it off.

Does it only work on small things?
Like bacteria? What about the little guy who is shaped like a foot? I forget what their name is, but they look like a slipper with wooly edges. What's the size limit on putting together stuff and then bringing it to life? I mean if there's no limit and you really went workin' you could put together a whole adult dog and then whack it with the _____ and it'd be alive. It'd probably be like a baby or a puppy or something and really a lot of trouble for something you could've gotten just by going to the local ASPCA...but it'd be a milestone.
*Though some people would argue that the dog would be some sort of abomination or a zombie or something because it's not 'the usual way of dog-making' and so the 'soul dispenser' would not have dispensed one for it. Again, little-known territory.

If you found out what could bring things to life...
Could you work it over on the people they've got in the cryo? Like someone in there 10 years I'd think is well and thoroughly deceased and you'd need the ____ to fix that.

In all, I say more power to 'em. We need more organs, and if gingerbread doll there is a step on the way, then by all means to go for it. Also being able to make totally custom bacteria would also have some good uses. It'd probably bash all the antibiotic resistant things that are troubling people now.

Paro the Seal Robot

2009-01-14T20:32:00.000-08:00

Robots sometimes get a bad rap in the media.
Killer robots? Robot zombies? Terminators? Skynet? Even the foot clan from the TMNT was composed of robots. (bad, ninja robots) Can't forget the non-evil robots too like the pesky plastic-faced japanese girls and fake secretaries etc. Those just further the "oh robot how quaint but I dont need that near me..."

So here comes Paro the seal to help change all that!
Paro is a baby (I guess harp-seal) plush who 'comes to life' when you interact with him/her. Like the Pleo dinosaur, it knows when you pet it, hit it, hug it, pick it, talk to it etc. But, it's far cuter than pleo, as well as more costly. They're like 6 grand! You can recharge it by giving it the pacifier on a cord. The whole thing is white, furry and nice, and it'll move around and blink too. But, it doesn't look like it'll walk.

Paro appeared at CES, so you can read about it on Popular Science here:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-01/ack-baby-seals-ces
You can see a video there too. Very clear, not long.

However, it's not new, it's been around a while, but CES is always good to raise the popularity or get something in the media-eye. And, more friendly robots like this one should be in the media eye! Some positive robot PR.

But, paro isn't a toy, it's a therapy-bot. Once everyone saw that cuddly pets help people feel better though programs like dogs who help at hospitals and other animal-therapy tests...well why not make up a fake animal then? All the benefits without any of the trouble. Paro won't get tired, and won't eat anything. You don't have to train him, or get volenteers to bring him in from home. Just plug him in and he's ready to go!

With that video, you can see Paro moves around when the camera user touches him. It also makes noise, but I guess seals make noise too. It really does look mostly like a baby seal, except maybe the eyelashes which are a bit big/wierd but oh well.

Why a seal?
There probably isn't anyone with seal-phobia. A seal never ate your baby, or bit your face off when you were little (like a dog) Nor did it give you horrible allergies or asthma or scratches (like a cat). It didn't bite you, screech horribly or get in your face (like a bird). Because no one personally KNOWS a seal, there's no expectations for a seal, good or bad. You HAVE to take it for granted just as you see it because there's no other reference except photos of these little white guys laying around on the ice. Plus, they're pretty cute to begin with so you don't have to change much.

He's furry, and has no pre-conceptions. It looks nice, and petable...and so it is! Anything that can speed recovery, help people feel better, or boost moods is a great thing!

Safe? 100% It's a plush.
Now? Yes
Cost? $6,000
Where? Japan

Tinfoil Tuesday: An Inconvenient Weapon

2009-01-13T19:29:00.000-08:00

Tinfoil tuesday is back with something that may seem humdrum but...at least appears to have some merit.

Dig around on our great internet enough and you'll find that some people think Inconvenience is/will be used as a weapon! At first, you may exclaim 'that's bogus'...but like all things, let's give it some more thought.

Inconvenince:
It's what happens when something is made difficult, which usually isn't /shouldn't be. A traffic jam is an inconvenince because the usual drive to wherever is usually free of long periods of having to stop the car/sit and wait for like 5 stoplight changes just to get somewhere you normally could.

Inconvenient things are a nuisance, but inconveninet does NOT equal impossible. That's one thing to keep in the forefront during this post. What did everyone do before convenience stores? Well they went to inconvenient stores, I suppose. But they still got there!

But as a weapon?
It's actually more likely than you'd think. See, a lot of people do not like inconvenince. If you make something annoying enough to do, they'll simply quit doing it. Of course, this won't apply to EVERYone. Nothing does, does it? No, it is not convenient or easy to get away with robbing banks, but this does not stop criminals from doing it. It isn't easy to swindle old ladies out of mortgage money, nor is it simple to become a corrupt politician, or a dodgy CEO who fleeces the company. But people still do. These, however, are not our subject.

Our subject, and continual hero of the foil-hat-clad...is the ever hapless public citizen!
Average joes and joe..ettes who hold normal jobs and live in normal families and do normal things like going on vacation and trying to put kids through college. It is this group which is generally considered to be under some kind of government threat or another (and no, it's not just in the USA--it can be anywhere)

The weapon called inconvenience is mainly thought to be weilded by the government in a rather "Big Brother-ish" way.
The poster-child example of this (in the US, at least) is the following:

The airport 'speedy pass' concept.
By pre-registering yourself by giving out loads of personal/family info and details to the government, you'll be able to get special privilages in airports so you can bypass long lines and other hassles and just get on with your traveling. Seems normal enough.

Foil hat view:
By basically ruinating air travel with shoenabomber searches, random body searches, infant-formula seizures, non-profiling-avoidance-Korean gran-gran searches, very long search lines, and pliars induced nipple-ring removals as well as forced hijab yankings and t-shirt bannings...everyone will run screaming to "Big Brother" to give out every personal detail they own so they don't have to put up with all that BS.
OR
They'll just sit still and never travel.
Either way, Big Bro wins the day. People who never fly/don't move are super citizens. They're easy to keep track of and control. People who give you all their info are also super citizens. You know everything about them!

Of course, there's loads of 'zany' news stories (zanyness sells, people!) to back it up, like the mom n' dad flying with an infant in a snow-delay prone zone of the USA who had all but 1 bottle of baby formula seized then got in a 24hr snow delay and had to TAKE BABY TO HOSPITAL to buy/beg/whatever formula avoid it starving to death/screeching continually for umpteen hrs in a sealed airport with no food suitable for someone under 6 months. And yes, all the above examples (no transformers Optimus prime Tshirts allowed on airplanes because Optimus prime is a gun owner! And the woman had to have a pliars given to her (or strip infront of men) because she had rings...on her nipples which set off metal detectors and they thought she was a boob-bomber. For real. Srsly.) are true and are pulled from reading wacky news places like www.fark.com among others.

So by coupling big-brother with the above "wacky" (but really awful if it's you!) "mishaps" that keep happening...you can see how people would volenteer the info.

But this is tinfoil tuesday.
So start applying it to more stuff. Gun ownership? Passports? Drivers License? Boat Owning? Hunting/fishing license? Convention going? Halloween costuming? You can apply it anywhere so long as the formula is "Make basic unwanted citizen activity 'X' so irritating that everyone just quits or hands over the info" You stuff it up with so many rules and regulations that it becomes not-worth while to do any more.

Tiny example:
Toll-roads. The glorious hold-up of the highway has given way to "EZ Pass" type things a transponder for your car. You put money into your account and then as the transponder passes under the toll-gate (while you don't stop!) the toll gate then extracts money and you're on your way. Nice?
Well what about the ticket/fine when you reach the next toll-gate too quickly for its liking? It deduces you were speeding. Or how about the ability to tax people based on how much/where they drive? The list goes on.

Future Angle:
Of course the whole 'conspiracy big brother' thing is futuristic, but let's take it a step further and really bring out the shiny, crinkly hats. RFID chips in your....well something where it can't be tampered/removed. The religious end calls these "marks of the devil" because of some writing somewhere that said that "At the end of the world (rly?) everyone will need to write like 'satan' or something on their forehead to be able to buy anything for some obutse reason" (and I'm sure it was written juuuust like that..hm.not a religious scholar much here...)

It's like the RFID chip in the passport that people don't really like and attempt to launder away in the wash. First off the ability to meddle with it is pretty high if you like h4x, which is never good. But this one goes inside the citizen somewhere so you can't just lever it out or hijack it in a stick-up like a wallet card. Sure, there's shoe-clips with GPS chips for your toddlers (don't lose the baby, now...) and GPS chips for teens' cars (don't trust the teen, now...) but really the best thing would be the old needle in the body-part treatment.

Prediction:
Chip-in-body will come. And it will roll out into the world on top of a car named 'convenience'. But where it goes from there is up to the public. Hopefully.

Closing:
Unlike the girl-elimination schemes and other foil-hattery this one actually has merit. You CAN indeed stop john q public by posting up enough hurdles. You won't stop anyone truly determined (and woe be the day jonny-p is pushed into that zone...) but that was never the point. Getting 'most of' the people to do 'whatever' is what's important. Plus, with the "out" of that you can say "Well we never MADE ANYONE DO...." is a huge bonus. No...they volentarily did it because they didn't want to face...inconvenience.

3D TV that you can TOUCH

2009-01-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows TV is great.
There's one in likely every home...so it's no surprise that people are always trying to figure out how to make TV better. HDTV is great, so much detail, so crisp and awesome to look at. But no matter how crisp the image, it's never 3D in your own home.

With "IMAX" type and 3D movies in theaters drawing in bigger crowds, (Like the upcoming Monsters Vs. Aliens...a big part of it's draw will be seeing the 3D effect as well as the comedy to it) it's proof that people would like 'more' out of their entertainment. (Plus really for the price of movies these days they NEED to step it up. Oy!)

And "The Future" has always been the home of 3D displays and holograms and stuff like that. Even R2D2 projected a 3D princess for everyone to see. 3D tv would certainly be pretty cool, but then you'd likely have zombies shooting out of it into your living room...or well more likely you'd have cars flying out of it because well, that's just how car ads are.

So if you thought we'd have 3D TV in the future, you're likely quite right. It's coming, just who knows when...and exactly what it'll be used for. It's probably the next step after everyone's through buying giant flatscreens with mega-resolution or whatever. And as usual, it can be used for good (take a detailed look at the artifacts on the History Channel!) and for not-so good (Take a closer look at Mike Rowe on Dirty Jobs...or the late nite infomercials will literally be able to flail the MEGA SQUEEGEE in your face)

BUT.
What sometimes happens is that some other technology will unexpectedly crop up along side a developing one and then the two merge to become Devastator--o wait something better. Scratch that last bit. But still, when things like that happen it's generally pretty awesome and makes the end-result that much cooler.

SO.
What's better than seeing something in 3D? Touching it! Yes! Being able to touch the things that shoot out of your TV would be totally awesome. It will be especially great because you could use it to pet Torchics. Think of all the things you could pet! Will it cause some new genere of show to come up? What will that be called? (A 'feely'?) Or how about like you really get to preview that new phone/berry/whatever? Car knobs/buttons? A faucet perhaps. The possibilitys of things people want to touch are endless. Hold some new game controller in your hands before you buy it! Action figures! Perhaps miniature pet monsters...hmm.

Impossible?
Not rly. Check out the following video where some Japanese person tries to jab a little paper through...NOTHING that's floating in the middle of the air! That's right, they've graduated from jabbing AR non-existant girls on cubes with paper tabs to jabbing levitating invisible teapots with paper tabs! And it's fantastic just look:

See how the paper bends when it tries to hit the side of the item? It's like it's really there...and it's the Airborn Ultrasound Tactile Display and they've just made it up. See, it's totally obvious that if you combo a big one of those pads (that's creating the effect) with 3D display and somehow you figured out how to line them up...you'd totally have 3D that you could touch. The item wouldn't be invisible like it is here.

The video explains to you that it's Acoustic Radiation Pressure, so you won't get like the feelings of things that are warm or cold or prickly or wooly or something (probably) but it should be good enough to get 'objecty'. It's apparently produced with transducers and they even combo it with a webcam in the video (that's how you can tell it's an invisible teapot)

Because you can actually touch it with your hands without gloves or expensive equipment, it's already a good sign. What we need is someone to acutally go there and lay a hand on that thing and then say what exactly it feels like! Can you imagine what it might feel like? Like, can that dude in the video scrub on the teapot with a finger just so, to find the spout/handle etc? If you couldn't see at all, could you touch-inspect items and know what they are?

So yeah, it's really new, but it's also really cool. This is one of those things that SEEMS like fantasy, like that'd never come true or whatever. Far-fetched. Though, it's this same type of far-fetched thing that's so awesome to discover someone's really done. They've been saying 'flying cars' for years yet they do not yet appear before us in 2009. When someone does finally get them going, it'll be great, but it'll be expected. This though...is another story.

But as with all things which have been invented, there's people out there wanting to improve upon them. This may be simple now, but it's proof of a concept for sure. Hopefully it leads to TV you can touch...and of course internet you can touch too, which is likely a lot scarier because streight away you know someone's going to make one for Clockspider and then email it to you.

Need to feel more energy while playing video games? Eat X-Tra Life the Videogame Food. Stay feeling full, hydrated and energized so you don't have to get up.

Future Brains Full of Fictitious Facts? (And 2009)

2008-12-31T22:47:00.000-08:00

Newyears eve is the time usually reserved for thinking about the future.
This blog does it all the time, but in general when the year #'s gonna change, it's time to ponder the year ahead. Hopefully 2009 will be full of all sorts of cool stuff and futuristic advancements to talk about and learn about right here!

This post isn't anything awesomely futuristic, just an observation, really, and a question about what's to come. Of course, accompanied by a wacky video. Also, something else unusual...usually I don't get into the posts, they're fairly objective reports on things with observations thrown all over. But a bit of a story kicks this one off...

Was messaging with someone about the state of TV these days being rather lame. The topic of Masked Rider / Kamen Rider comes up. That's some show they're importing from Japan for kids tv over here in the USA. It's similar to Power Rangers, in that it has masked super types fighting somewhat supernatural villains in IRL. I'm not into that sort of show so I likely won't be watching it, but the topic of "Throw-away villains / cannonfodder villains" came up. So I was like

"Oh, the Tengu in Power Rangers"
And then immideatly did a WTHHHH. I didn't ever LIKE PR. I wasn't a fan. I saw the show like part-way thru maybe 3 eps worth. Never saw the movie. So how the heck did I know to say "Tengu" (like monkey crows or something...dudes in suits!) WHY do I remember this? I don't know who the 14th prez. of the USA is, but Oh there goes a tengu! HUR HUR. I'll bet like...everyone can name more pokemon then they can countries in Africa. The intricasies of politics in video game worlds! 1000s of enemy types! Strategy that is of no use in the outside world!

All this got me to thinking. These ARE facts, but they are fictitious facts. And it's a fairly recent trend too, that everyone has loaded up on these fictitious facts. Let's look at history!

Like the 1900s or something and earlier-
All the stuff people hoarded in their brains was likely relevent to the world at large, their jobs, relationships and town. Mostly actual facts were looked for and learned. Likely pretty dull unless you were in math, science or art.
1950s or around there-
Sports got pretty big in a lot of places. Like soccer/football/baseball and all that. People started memorizing facts about this. Still actual facts, but knowing some guys' batting average isn't like tops for usefulness outside the fandom. And sports is just one example here, there's tons of others.
1980s- Yeah cardgames, video games, comic books, tons of animated shows, anime, manga etc you name it. (AKA: the fun stuff) Tons of stuff to shower you with interesting facts about stuff that doesn't really exist.

And it's not just those 'human encyclopedia' people either. Start asking around. How much do you know about fictional worlds vs this one? Find some little kids and ask them. Ask relatives. What's it gonna do in the future as alternate worlds get more complex and awesome? WHY do we easily get these FFs into our brains over other things which would at least make us appear smarter/more worldly if we memorized that instead? I have no idea. It can't always be "becauese you're more interested" because really, IDC the power rangers! Rita, Zed, Zod...Trini...Jason WTH! Just writing off the top of my head there and I'm churning out names and faces for a show I didn't care about and saw pieces of a grand total of like 5 times. Yet, what does Grover Cleveland look like, where on the continent is Zambia located, and how do I multiply uneven fractions? I don't know!

However, I'll bet the future holds even more fictious facts to creep into everyone's mind and...well you can't really klutter up a brain because you can't fill one up so, well, they'll just get in there.

And on that note, someone is filling up the baby with fictitious facts:

Babies, apparently learn things really easily. After all, at that point you are learning your first language, and other important things like how to eat food. It's a whirlwind time of learning, and if you have a rather ordinary baby, and don't just throw it into daycare 12 hrs a day you can apparently teach it all kinds of things. Americas' Funniest Videos would have these types on there, 'hilariously' reciting presidents, states, and countries of the world. I'd bet that those babies weren't some kind of genioiuses...but that all they did was sit there and patiently work with them like 2x day for a month or something.

The above baby has memorized what various video game characters look like. (Yes, there's Sonic! The upbringing will likely be ok now that there is Sonic.) These are no different than presidents of the USA or countries, which are just shapes. Video game likers will find it charming, but video game haters will go into a froth.

Fictional facts are here to stay, and they seem easier to memorize than actual facts in most instances. So, if you'll excuse me I have to go sit beneath my torchic collection while debating the lameness of werehogs with someone in the Ghuralian solar system while fighting on/in a train to the coastal town of Paracabana! The president's name is Laia Martinez. w00p.

Tinfoil Tuesday: What is Project GROG?

2008-12-30T13:50:00.000-08:00

Testing out a new type of posting "Tinfoil Hat Tuesday"- posts with a theme!
As you know "Tin Foil Hats" are what overly-paranoid people put on their heads to keep mind-control rays out. Or alien rays. Or advertising rays. But, since it's a rather wacky thing to do, "Tin foil hat" has become synonamous for "something overly paranoid/ramblings". However, sometimes this stuff has it's start in facts (much like some myths/legends etc)

So for the first Tinfoil Tuesday: Project GROG
What is it? Get Rid Of Girls. Who is suspected of doing it? China. Why is it in the foil hat zone? It's mostly blathering suspicion at this point, who knows if anyone would go through with it if they could. But with advances today, the "IF" will go away in the future.

First, be sure to look up the post "Pink Vs. Blue: We're gettin' rid of you" on here, because it started the foundation concept for this. Basically, in some countries, they don't like girls, so when given the chance they either abort them, or dispose of the girl baby in some clever (or not) way. The Pink Vs Blue was a test you could use on yourself (if pregnant) to see which type of baby you'd have, before it turned into a person. That way you could get rid of it if you didn't want one type or the other. It then turned into a bit of an ethics post, full of questions.

So. GROG.
The Tin Foil Hats suspect China of wanting to be able to "Do away with" girls all together. Of course, everyone over there can't feel that way, girls aren't going to want to dispose of themselves, and I'm sure anyone who's happily married/dating/crushing-on someone wants to keep their W/GF whatever so the whole concept's a bit shady on the surface.

So then, WHY are there like a bajillion "Missing" (ie, never born) girls there? Why is the ratio of dudes to girls getting all put off? What is there to do about it? All the rumblings of the rest of the world's Foil Hat club has only the "Outside world perception" of China to go on so hopefully they're off base...

The view:
China is Xenophobic. (No, they're not afraid of xenomorphs, those things from ALIEN) it means that they're viewed, on the whole, to not be attracted to non-Chinese people. Humans in general are pretty similar looking, but whatever is slightly different about people from other lands, they don't like it over there! So importing girls once they finally do throw the ratio so far off is out of the question.
China is a spooky commie crazytown. Most of the foil hatters are older and remember when Russia was like, trying to take over the world or something and spread communism all around so like communists scare them. ALSO when it's a communist state supposedly they can make up labs and things to do not-so-ethical stuff and not have to worry about government crackdowns because hey...it's the gov't doing it.
Less Ethical Places Make Odd Advances. It's true. The USA, the UK area, France and all them ARENT going to be the first to clone a dude. SOMEONE is going to clone a dude. It's only a matter of time, and that's no foil hat. Those places have all sorts of money to throw around, good scientists, good minds...but there's loads of laws to get in the way. Progress isn't always moral. It's going to take a fringe-state to clone someone. It'll take longer, but without endless ethics debates, religion, politics and all that to get in the way science will pull it off.

So the proverbial "Stew Pot" conditions are right. A land getting set to run out of girls, a land that doesn't want girls from elsewhere, a land that isn't afraid of ethics and has cashola to throw around with some good minds.

All project GROG would need to work would be some device (like a big jar) that could carry a baby human from fertalized 1 cell all the way up to 'ready to be born' and then let it out. So long as the baby was healthy, normal and didn't go all defective later on (ie normal life expectancy person) and you had a source of eggs (either frozen ones or cloning/stem cells/whatever) and guys, you'd be all set. Of course that's far easier said than done...

But do I believe someone, somewhere is working on it?
Absolutely. For some GROG like project? Not likely. Grog is likely to be just fearmongering or, as the title states, tinfoil hattery. Of course there's the possibility for it to be mis-used (ie, grog) but there are probably also medical benefits too, and all the learning and curing of things that could go on with it.
But, the very FACT that this "Fear" is out there, is extremely futuristic! Sci-fi does explore this sometimes, and the anime/manga for Saber Marionette does too. (Marionettes are robots that look just like girls, to replace girls, because there's a space colony that can only clone up more guys)

***Aside***
Occam's Razor:
Occam's Razor isn't sharp. It's a concept that says "The simplest way is often THE way". In that, the easiest/most streight foreward answer is usually the right one. Let us apply Occam's Razor to "girls are worse".

No. They're not. There was never anything inherently wrong with being female. They're not "less" they're not "inferior" there's no basis for any of it culturally or otherwise to dump on them. So then what's the problem? The answer is PURE GENIOUS and it was in your history book. A speedy summary if you will...

A loooong time ago everyone human was a hunter/gatherer. If you look at how they operated everyone just kind of hung out doing the necisary things. Dudes hunted, girls gathered, sometimes they could change it up and that was fine. Some people still do it today. There wasn't a huge hierarchy/monopoly/ruling whatever. Groups were small, everyone moved around etc. Ok fine for them.

Someone invents farming.
Yes it's the whole Tigress/Euphrates river valley area place they suspect the whole idea got started at in your book. Now everyone doesn't have to move, you got more people together in one place. For reasons likely never to be known, "Rulers" must be established. Yes the tribes had leaders too...but these are a different sort. A question arises:

"How do you INSTANTLY cut in half the number of people YOU have to CONTROL?"

Controlling more people is good. Controlling more people is more difficult too. So what if you could control 100 or 1000 people, but make it JUST LIKE you only had to have 50 or 500 under your thumb? Occams Razors' answer:

"Tell 1/2 the people they're better than the other half."

The people you told were 'better' will control the other half for you. Give them the same status as cows. Cows are easy to boss around. They don't start revolutions. They don't give you trouble. Base religion around it. Throw out the 'mother goddess' put in a male-centric system. Don't give females any say. Tell males they're better long enough...and you'll only need to rule THEM. They'll rule the other half for you. After all, what is always guarenteed to be half and half? boys/girls.
Are there exceptions? Always. But if it works on-the-whole, it tends to be good enough for history. Look around in your historical books. "On the whole" is enough.

So females lost the "cosmic coin toss" on Occams Razor so many thousands of years ago. What about the people who dump on girls today?
"If you're looking for something, you tend to find it". Want a new car that's green? You'll start noticing loads of green cars on the road. Where'd they all come from? They were always there, you just got yourself tuned to noticing them. "When the student is ready, the master will appear" is in this same, but much older, bucket. So it goes that if you're looking for the "Awfulness of women" you're GOING to find it. Same with the ones looking for examples of "The awfulness of men". Proof arises all the time, for either side because it's what the 'prover' is seeking actively.

Occam's answer is so brilliant here because it has nothing to do with guys or girls, it's ONLY to do with power. Power is the root of everything. Not good, not evil, everything. Even if it's just the power to keep on livin'.

Is it THE answer? Who knows. No one will likely ever know.
It makes a whole lot of sense, though. But the thing that's for sure, is it'd be a bad idea to "get rid of" one side or the other. Different brains, different ways of thinking, different ideas, combining, talking, brainstorming, thinking of things together and separately in new ways. One fills in for another's weakness, each side playing up and backing up the other's strengths. Adding a new perspective, teaming up and taking down problems. It takes all kinds of teamwork to make the world a better place, and eliminating one type of player is sure to be a handicap, no matter who it is.

Make the future a better place: Keep everyone in it.

Are your lightbulbs legal?

2008-12-26T19:06:00.000-08:00

"Tonight on the 11 o'clock news do you have ILLEGAL ITEMS hiding in your HOUSE RIGHT NOW?"

Yes, sensationalism, and with this future development, there's sure to be plenty of it. You know those curly whirly lightbulbs that you can buy now to "Go Green" if you so desire? They're soon to be the ONLY bulb in town.

That's right, many places around the world are looking to OUTLAW our old friendly regular bulby-bulb type of lights. Why? They waste energy, and were invented 100 years ago. Supposedly, only 10% of the bulb energy converts into light, the other I guess goes to heat your house up or something.

The usual "Way of the future" is being busted up a bit here, as usually "Futuristic" things are so much better than ordinary things, that they're just adopted on their own, and the oldschool item simply fades away.
Yes, no one really uses VHS tapes any more, but are they banninating VCRs? No. Can you still buy one of those wierd lamps that has a wick in it and some sort of smelly-smelling colored oil that you put in the bottom? Yeah, it's harder to do, but the odd old relics are certainly not contraband.

Well no one wants oily lamps because they're messy, they smell funny, they do a soot and it's probably dangerous in some way if you spill the oil or turn up the wick or something. Also they're expensive and not that bright. So it's no wonder no one uses those (aside from the whole 'polluting' thing) *But you can still get 'em!*

Not so fast, apparently, with the house-hold staple, the bulb!
The first country to give the bulb the boot is Republic of Ireland. They'll be banning the bulbs in 2009. The USA is set to follow in...some other year. Probably 2014, but who knows because there's already lots of waffling on the issue. But what will it mean?

Will you have to unscrew all your 'bad bulbs' or face the cops?
Will that just mean stores can't sell the regular bulbs any more?
What can you do if you have some old school lamp that's like totally awesome but the swirl bulb won't go in there?
Can you still import 'bad bulbs' if you want to?
Will old light bulbs become some kind of wierd collector item?
Will light bulbs of old (if they still work) somehow get confiscated?
Will there be exceptions to the rule, like Christmas lights, night-lights and other mini-bulbs?

All these are important questions to consider, especially if you're in Ireland! And with "other countries" set to "Follow suit" it's a good idea to look out for these questions no matter where you are in the world. But, are those the really important questions?

Not really.
This may be a blog, but the science here is the real deal, and so are the questions. Being a citizen of the Earth and also an observant blogger, SOMEONE needs to address the important issues with these bulbs because it doesn't look like the Ireland government really thought things through before jumping on the green wagon. This is not meant to be sensational/scare/tinfoil hattery, it's just real questions coming from a real consumer.

Uh-Oh: Mercury in your rug!
Those curly bulbs? They use mercury to make them run. This heavy metal is super dangerous and mega poisonous to even be around. A drip of mercury goes into every one to do the chemical reaction inside. If you breathe near mercury, you could get really sick. But what's the problem, it's sealed in a bulb!

Questions:
Have you ever broken a light bulb? Is every lamp in the house proof from shattering? Do you have pets who knock over things? Do accidents ever have the possibility to happen in your home? Have you ever been anywhere that someone ELSE has broken a light bulb? Do you think that EVERY ONE will dispose of their bulb in a manner so that it does not break ever? How many light bulbs go out each week in the USA and people throw them out?

In that list, I'll bet there's not 1 person who can say "no" to everything. And the moment one of those drops, the mercury flies out. Toxic trash! Mercury spilling into your rug and creating toxic fumes worse than radon? Enough mercury in 1 bulb to poison your pets to death if they lay where it broke? No one's going to cut out their whole carpet because Fido knocked over the lamp, and how the heck do you clean up LIQUID METAL? I don't think Mr. Clean knows. The REAL question is "Does ANYBODY know the mercury is in there?"

Uh Oh: Temperature:
Supposedly these compact flourescent bulbs don't work too well if it's too cold. They flicker, dim, and act all obnoxious. How can you light your house, or use one outside in the winter? Ireland isn't that warm all year long, hopefully they'll figure it out first? (Dear Ireland: if you figure this out, please tell everyone. Thank you)
Uh Oh: Noisy:
Do these bulbs make a racket if the temperature is 'just so'? Some people say the light they have isn't as bright, or it's color is not so warm. Colored lighting CAN be important in northern regions where it may be dim for long periods in the winter. Frosty gray skies, and harsh white light inside at all times has been said to bother people. Could it cause people to get "The winter blues"?
Cost:
Any non-regular bulb is going to cost more. Yes, they're energy-saving so you do eventually make up for it, but any sudden banning/switch would be rough on people with a difficult budget or a low income. The cost's got to come down on some alternatives!

Hope on the horizon?
Well maybe. LEDs are nice. Expensive, but nice. They don't contain toxic crazyness, are tiny and hard to break, but they cost still more money. They last much longer though! However, unless rigged right, they're also not as bright. Have you seen a LED-Bulb? Right now they look like a prickly huge thing...that's hardly going to fit in your fixture. Still, hopefully LED can be improved upon/innovated with to skip everyone over the curly craze...hopefully before the oldschool goes illegal in the USA!

Frivolous Question 1:
What will happen to "The worlds' oldest lightbulb"? Yes, there's some dim bulb in a theater somewhere that's been turned on since like 1901 or something. They had better leave that thing alone. You can look it up on google.
Frivolous Question 2:
When "low water flush" toilets (a toilet that uses less water, but doesn't work as well) went wild in the USA "Toilet Tourism" went up! People taking a loo vacation to Canada to bring back the for-real-flushers. Will Lightbulb Tourism suddenly arise?
Frivolous Question 3:
Novelty bulbs in danger? Black Light parties get 'speak easy' status? Holiday lighting? I've not seen red or green compact flourescent bulbs for your xmas display. Your car has tiny lightbulbs in there too doesn't it? Like the 'dome light' and some other stuff? What'll become of that? Not every tail-light or head-light is an LED.

Yes, we're on the way to the future, times are changin' and apparently even our friendly staple, the light-bulb is not safe from change. But hopefully, it'll be a change for the better.

Bringin' Back the Mammoth?

2008-12-19T22:04:00.000-08:00

How can something from the past be futuristic?

Well, the future is supposed to have all sorts of awesome insights into the past, and sometimes even animals that don't exist now. One of these things is the Wooly Mammoth. Surely, a real mammoth would have all kinds of insights into the past, and about extinction, and habitats etc.

Mammoths got back into the public eye a bit with Ice Age and it's sequels. A statistic was also published that said for the expense of making another 'ice age' movie, you could actually make a real live mammoth. How? With the DNA from the hairs that people keep finding in the ice. Rather fortunately, they lived where it was easy to freeze and get preserved if they died. So just like CSI, if you can dig one up, you can probably get some DNA out of it.

And they did. This article highlights how they're putting back together the genetic code http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27805964/ to see if they can get a real mammoth out of it.

Personally, it'd probably be pretty cool. Whoever does it will get a fortune in T-shirt sales alone. Plus, they could comb it and sell the hair too. Everyone would go see it, you'd get serious tourism about it. It's so big, no one could miss it. They should go for it, if someone can get one together, and make sure it was happy...

Which leads to the next question: Were mammoths nice? Sure Indian elephans can be nice and smart, but some are really cranky/crazy in Africa. Are mammoths mostly calm, or will the thing be trying to go on a constant zoo rampage? No one but cave men have seen the personality, and even then they were trying to kill them, not observe them. No one ever asks 'were mammoths nice' when going over things like this, so it's about time.

Which leads to other things to bring back:
The dodo! Supposedly this was an awesome bird. It was big. It was wacky looking. It was super freindly even when it shouldn't be (hence the name) Is anyone else thinking 'cool pet'? Some wacky giant bird who wants to be your pal, and gets along with your other pets? Awesome. Who cares if it wasn't the brainy-est thing, goldfish aren't either but look where they are. Some big soft pettable friend-bird would be so cool. Bring back the dodo!

The Moa:
A giant 450 lbs bird that eats vegetation. (so it's fairly safe unless it steps on you) This is another case of a 'not so petlike' animal that people would flock to see but won't murder the hfil out of everything just on general principals. Plus, humans caused it to go extinct so undo that mistake and let 'em back.

Giant Squids:
They're not extinct. But they're too hard to find. Clone one, put it in an aquarium, and you're set.

But what NOT to bring back?
Australian Marsupial Wolf- It looked like a striped wolf. But it had a nasty habit of poking 2 vampire-like holes in the skulls of whatever it wanted. This includes sheep and your children. It would end up like a mountain-lion...annoying crazy beast that will whack someone occaisionally. Maybe do 1, and shove it in a zoo. The end.

Haast Eagle
You really don't want these guys around either. It's a huge eagle. It flies around. It eats big things like Moa birds and...."Its size and weight indicate a bodily striking force equivalent to a cinder block landing on the target from a height of 25 m" So this punk is going to come flying out the the sky with the force of a cinderblock and then proceed to twist your head off. Since Moas weigh 450 lbs, humans are probably pretty 'snacky time' looking to this guy and since he flies there's not a whole lot to do about it if it decides to go in for a crash landing. You can read about it on Wikipedia, though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haast%27s_Eagle

There are probably plenty of other things you don't want coming back around, and probably plenty more that would be nice to have. Still, with the mammoth obession about, I'd really bet we see one in the not so distant future. It doesn't look that hard, it doesn't look that expensive, and it's got a lot of press...all good signs.

Where are my AR Goggles?

2008-12-18T00:05:00.000-08:00

OK AR.

Very cool stuff. You've seen cubegirl and now you can look at minicar as it rests atop your magazine page.

There is A LOT to be done with AR, and it's mysterious why it's not getting done yet. If it's easy enough that some yahoos can make a mini genie girl for people to torment with tabs of paper...then where the heck are my battling monsters?? You know...IMPORTANT things to do with AR.

The ad for the mini was reportedly "difficult to get to" according to Gizmodo, because you have to look at the page, see the ad, follow the instructions to the website, wait to load it, aim/hook up your webcam, aim it at the mag and....there's your 3d car. Yes, it's pretty troublesome for something that most people want to avoid (ads) but, since AR is so new, likely the ad has everyone jumping on the net to see what it's about.

Breakdown:

Really a car makes a lot of sense for this application. Cars are complicated, you likely want to see them from a bunch of angles. They could enhance it by also making a little tab like the girl had so you could press parts of the ARcar. Like lift up the hood or fold up the seats or something. All kinds of stuff you do in the show room, but now in your own home atop your own magazine page! The big simple symbols on the page are obviously the 'tracking' symbols, much like the triangles on the girl's box.

Whoever does this will get a million squillion dollars:

Invent an AR goggles already. If some darn 30 dollar webcam can pick up the symbols, and there's already portable-glasses-tv, I don't really see where the huge impassable hurdle is. Especially if there was a way to just over-lay the AR onto what you already see. You wouldn't need to always be watching a video-feed of everything you could already see normally. Just something with the ability to lay it on top of the scene. Curiously IF you took a 30 dollar webcam, some wi-fi, AND you could hook it up to your portable goggles-tv, would you get VR glasses? Like primitive lame ones that looked really odd?

Let this story section explain it to you:

"Wow, what a dump." She looked around the mostly barren front-room of the tiny house. It contained a simple cracked plastic table, one plastic patio chair, and a cinder-block-and-board bookshelf, lined with anime disks.

The next room was no better, containing only a ratty couch and a large TV. The only thing which looked out of place, were the odd black & white stickers and posters on the walls. Some things had little cubes resting on them. "He must not have been in here much...no wonder he's so hard to track down!"

"You might want to think again. Put on your AR set..."

She watched the other woman for a minute, as she gazed around in slight wonder at the spare walls and dirty floor. At last, she grudgingly put on the set.

The apartment sprang to vibrant life, when viewed with AR. The cement floor was covered in plush carpet, and the walls had many colorful posters (mostly of naked anime girls, but they occaisionally moved, to wink, wave or twirl)

"Well I can't say much for his taste, anyway!"

While studiously ignoring the porn-walls, she wandered over to the table, which now looked like fine mahogany. Behind it was a playful puppy, it wagged and barked silently as she drew near. Kneeling before it she was charmed, even though it was bright green. Lifting the headset returned everything to the bleak gray and white. She lowered it again.

"This is amazing!"

"AR was always called 'poor mans vr'...the stuff people 'made do' with, who couldn't afford to really plug it in. It kind of got skipped over with the VR breakthrough."

"But in a way, isn't this a bit more real?"

"In the sense that the table is really there, yes...but our feet are still all the way through the carpet, and you'll still put your hand right through the puppy. At least with VR you can really touch things."

"He really spent quite a bit on this place, didn't he?"

"Looks that way. It's like people who kept pouring more and more money into an old car...to make it look like a hot-rod...though it never would be. If they'd of just saved up, they could have had the real thing."

The couch area had been set to look like a jungle, with complex leafy plants and even an exoitc bird. The couch looked like the finest leather, in a warm and inviting tan. The view out the window, instead of showing the roof of the next building, held a seascape. The rest of the house was equally opulant, and a french maid even waited in the bedroom. She waved her feather duster and pranced about in her designated corner. Lifting the goggles revealed the large cube that produced her.

"Really, it would be easy to come home to...this."

"Yeah. As long as you never take the goggles off, it's one big tacky wonderland. And he did it all with cubes and stickers!"

The scenario above sounds like pure SciFi but if you really DID have AR goggles, the whole thing would surely come true in about 1 month. If you can get a girl on a cube or a car on a magazine, you can get a moving poster. Or, if you were wearing the goggles, you could surely make life-size items. Put a series of sticker/symbols on your car and it's an insta-Ferrari. Life size whoever is interacting in your house. Famous paintings on your walls, and games you literally play in your living room.

It's all rather great...if only someone could come up with AR goggles.

In Ur Head Seein Ur Dreamz

2008-12-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

So long as you dream in simple lolspeak, that is!
It's all over the internet now, and it's interestingly futuristic so the new Japanese Dream Viewing Device needs some words typed about it. The first to go on about it AND post up a photo seems to be Gizmodo at http://gizmodo.com/5107377/new-technology-could-display-your-dreams-on-screen

Naturally, the thing's captioned in Japanese, but that doesn't stop you from seeing what it does. Interestingly, it has nothing to do with dreaming. Perfectly awake people were exposed to (for some reason, english) letters and the machine was then able to peep the old visual cortex and get out blurry grainy versions of the same letters!

This is quite a leap the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories dudes have made. The current (and already covered here) "Mind Reading Interface" interperated 'states of mind' as commands for video games and getting simple things to happen on a screen like 'push the box' and 'pull the cube'. The USA military is of course also contemplating "think loudly!" and training devices to pick up on people's mental speech, while not realizing that IRL it's not "The Wonder Years".

So let's break this thing down, shall we?
Why did they use non-asian, non-cyrillic, non-arabic letters?
They're simple. If it's one thing English/German/French/Spanish etc letters have on the other guys, it's the wonderful simplicity of the letters. Reduce 'em super small? Still see it. Use 'em to build nearly inf. words? Got it. English spelling may be screwy as all heck (yeah! Through doesn't rhyme with Rough! That makes sense! Not.) but for legibility this charset can't really be beat so long as it doesn't dip into cursive. I SERIOUSLY don't think their gizmo could have conjured up some fancy liney kanji from whoever this is's head. (Kanji are the big, wooly whole-word representing symbols that you have no choice but to memorize as a whole....yeah 2,000 of them...because you can't get components and simply memorize the 'letters' that make them up)

Being the first one ever, you can easily get past that it's simple and pixelated.
EVERYthing starts out simple and pixelated. It'll surely crisp up later, if thought is put into it (oooh, pun-like statement? Well.) and it'd have to, to do much good. No one dreams about like...huge letters written on cards unless they watched too much Sesame St. that day.

And WHY use it to read dreams?
Yes, sometimes people dream useful things. But most of the time they're nonsensical garbage, scary, or, according to the comments, involve sex with everyone EXCEPT the person you profess to be in love with. While you could conceivably make a FPV porn out of the last one, it'd last an amazing 5 seconds! They've always gone on about "dreams are super short, even though it feels like they last for like 20 minutes or something---they dont". So yeah, you could collect up your cortex vortex of pr0n but it'd be so short-lived likely no one could tell what even happened. Unless whatever device this is can "Slow down precieved time" like the brain does while it dreams, they're out of luck there.

Likely another option to explore would be:
You=Camera. If this device can show what people are seeing, wouldn't that render the user into a really large handycam? This would be great for uh...spies. If the device were somehow both portable and invisible. You could get a lot of FPP shots of...stuff...people do. But who is interesting enough to warrant a "Behind their eyes" look at whatever activity they're at? And does it come with natural steadycam?

Can they reverse it?
Well if they can get images out of the visual cortex, can they shove some in there? If it can go in reverse, and do a good enough job (ie no huge pixels all over, and actual 'scenes') blind people likely wouldn't ever be blind any more. Hotness.

Needs an expert:
DO dreams take place in your visual cortex? I don't know. But if this is so cortex-centric if dreams went shooping out of elsewhere in the mind, I think it'd fail. Also, where do the things you see in the 'minds eye' of your imagination get uh....all thought up? Is it the visual cortex too? If it was, you could imagine some scene and then the machine could show it to you. If not, bleh, you're still a camera. But if this can see what you imagine (at some later point...)

Imagination Station!
Artists YEAH! You can see the ____ in your mind but the drawing always comes up BS! OHHHH FIXED! Or like, you cant manipulate your copy of photoshop quite well enough to conjure the complex Lara Croft scene you're itching to unleash on the world....turn on the mind-o-matic and then paste the result onto the internet.
Beware:
Do you really want to see what 4chan is thinking? A lot of art doesn't get made because the person can't draw what's on their mind well enough. This could end that, for better or for worse--so when Admiral Ackbar says it's a trap, think both ways.

Use it on:
Someone who can't see. Everyone has imagination. How does it work when you never saw anything before? Does it (the device) work?
Dolphins: What ARE they thinking about/imagining?
Movie Directors- Can you think up a whole movie?
Someone with dyslexia- Show everyone what it's like to foster the understanding of it.

Won't work with:
Musical things. There is no "Noise Cortex" to hook it up to. Sound track will not be included.
Speaking. Unless you have synestheia you can't see spoken words or music.
Smells.
You can't has a flavor.

All in all, it is EXTREMELY interesting and packed with potential for coolness. Hopefully it develops into something that allows loads of people to produce righteously awesome media and shows everyone a new perspective on the minds of others to further understanding.

No lil' info block on this one, too many unknowns.

Fake Wives: It's a guy thing?

2008-12-10T23:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, fake wives:
This seems to really be a 'guy thing'. And by 'fake wife' that is people who wish to marry something that isn't alive. Why aren't there more girls out there making up fake husbands? Or how about girls trying to marry really odd things and/or objects?

To see the future more clearly...let us look at the past!
The first really well-known case of a guy who wanted to marry a fake wife was a greek. (yes this is a myth! It's story time on the blog.) Apparently this dude was a great sculptor. He sculpted only the most awesome statues of various people and things. So one day he decided to sculpt some woman, but this time, he'd out-do himself. He'd make her the prettiest statue in the whole world!
And as he worked...he slowly started to fall in love with his sculpture. This only drove him to work better at it, and fall more in love. But since the Gods were watching (sometimes) the interesting things mortals do, one of the goddesses took pity on the dude and brought the statue to life. Presumably, they lived happily ever after.

*But someone thought highly enough of it to make it up and KEEP it around to this very day!*

Ever since that never really happened, it seems every so often you'll get a case of something similar. Like the guy from Tennessee back in like 2006 who wanted to marry his car. He really did love her, and cared for her, and maybe she even could come in his house (though really she'd take up a lot of it) And even if he wore a suit and gave her a ring, and she wore a veil....alas, they could not get married because she couldn't say 'yes'.
So his love for her may have been real, but unless the car was possessed by something, the host of a future AI, or an alien, it couldn't ever love him back. Much like a statue, sans godh4x.

Then the dude, just a few months ago in japan. You probably even read that story. Starting a petition to be able to marry fictitious girls legitly. He really reeeely wanted to marry someone from Haruhi Suzumiya (an anime) But then, apparently so did a lot of people because his petition got quite far. Naturally this story is usually accompanied by photos that someone took of their poster of so-and-so, or them enjoying a meal across from a drawing/screencap/desktop of their beloved, also enjoying a meal.

But why is it ONLY GUYS that you see doing this?
Where are the girls who want to marry pick up trucks? The ladies in love with bronze man statues? The girls pining so much after hmmm....Piccolo or something that they're snappin' pix of themselves at a romantic candle-lit dinner across from a portrait? (of him drinking water...because he doesn't eat...yet has fangs)

Usually, if something happens with dudes, it's also happening somewhere with girls...but seemingly not this 'marrying the non living' thing. Either that, or girls keep it so hush-hush that no one's found out, but I don't think that's likely.

Of course, robots MUST get into this discussion:
Le Trung, an inventor has made a robo-wife. You can see a video here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2023392.ece (the part where he's talking to her decapitated head on a mess of wires on a chair is precious) She looks a tad cross-eyed sometimes, and her sort of fishy-mouth could use a bit of snap to it, but really she's not that bad for one dude working in the garage.

A robo-wife would of course, be the pinnacle of marrying something that's not alive. It's real, touchable, inter-act-able, you can get it exactly how you want it, and if you can get a good enough AI in there it might actually turn into a person. (In which case you'd have to seek something else--as the whole objective seemed to be that it was a non-person that was desired)

The guy claims he was 'too busy' to find some sort of a soul mate so he started trying to build one. He got Aiko. Of course, he's still working on her because she's got quite the ways to go before she quits being a doll who can OCR your papers and facial recognition your face, and turns into...well something a bit more personish. The article says she'll do chores, but, she cannot walk (yet) so it's rather difficult to imagine just what chore she'd do. (the photo has her cleaning a mirror with a sponge because she doesn't know that will streak them up)

But where are the doughy-complexioned, slightly cross-eyed, "most perfect husbands"? Who is working on bringing these about? Really, it is a mystery. It must be something psychological somewhere that makes guys more prone to such things.
You sometimes even see it in male non-humans such as an Elephant Seal who travelled a mile over land to sing to a cow in a field who did not love him. The swan who fell for a swan-shaped paddle boat in a lake, and would court her endlessly, though she was 10x his size and metal. Or the poor sap elk who courts the (less fortunate) car. With general animals like these it's considered an accident...but...where are the girl animals doing this?

Still, hopefully, one day the people can marry their robots, their living-cars, and whatever else gets some decent AI in it. Everyone seems so dissatisfied with other humans that it isn't any wonder the issue comes up.

The remaining question for right now is...
Is loving someone who isn't alive and never was, a most heart-breaking love, or a most perfect love?

If you think streight away one or the other, stop quite hard to consider the question.

Multiple Kill Vehicle (Not really a vehicle)

2008-12-09T21:48:00.000-08:00

Multiple Kill Vehicle needs a bit of a new name.
First, it doesn't really 'kill' anything (yet) and it isn't a vehicle in the traditional sense of 'something you can ride around in'. What it is, is a vaguely cylindrical flying item which has the ability to destroy missiles that you'd rather not have reach their targets. (IE your boat/car/whatever)

Doesn't sound very impressive, does it?
Just another missile-defense item for the ol' arsenal. Even if you were to see a photo of it, you'd likely not be all that impressed. Several tubes secured to an ambiguous metal center item. What do you do, throw it at the incoming fire? No. You watch this video.

And then you see it's something streight out of sci-fi! The effect comes off as a DAMM successful levitation. It clearly isn't levitation in the true sense, as it is obviously rocket powered but...the precision hovering, the really bizzarre flight pattern thats just so precice. It's crazy stuff! You have to admit THIS thing looks like it's streight out of scifi or something. Maybe you have to avoid them in the latest video game.

And, unsurprisingly, it scares many people who watch its video!
The whole 'giant flaming jets shooting out from all over it' probably gives it a lead in this area, along with the misnomer name. It really should be "Multiple Missile Elimination Vehicle" because that's what it's for. It flies up there with the rockets/missiles etc. (even the smart chaff-spraying ones) and basically uses something to knock 'em all down before they can reach the target. Usual systems have to shoot them, or their decoys one at a time, but this thing gets right up in the fray, and dispenses mini-targets that slam into the missiles. Presumably, you could also let it out of an airplane, and it'd do it's crazy hover thing at any level of the atmosphere.

But why is it scary?
Flames. Eerie hovering. Machine-gun-like sound. The 'you dont know what the hellz this is' factor. It's got 'em all going for it. You can't tell me letting out a couple of these things wouldn't break up a riot. It also seems like something machine guns could be mounted to. You don't want this thing shooting down your door, then hovering right on through the house, looking for you.

Calm down.
It's rocket powered. Rockets are notorious fuel-hogs, so it's not going to be patrolling the hood any time soon. Fortunately, missile-strikes are also rather short lived, so it can likely chill out mid-air shooting them down and dispensing mini missile-stoppers for plenty long enough to clear the air. But not long enough to allow unscrupulous warlords to terrorize you with them.

While it may frighten some people away, it's actually pretty decent. It stops super dangerous missiles from killing people. It's un-manned so it doesn't put anyone in danger while it does it. If it gets wrecked, yeah, they'll be sad, but they can always build another one. Anything to get people out of harms' way, is something that's not all bad.

Still: It is sci-fi cool/future you must look at it!
Has indeed commenced.

Vehicle Curiosity: 6 Legs & Cuts Down Trees

2008-12-07T23:46:00.000-08:00

What has 6 legs and chops down trees?
No, not a radio-active beaver, this thing:

Called Timberjack, it was invented to log on rough land. The video here is fairly old, so it may have some new features by this point, but it's still really interesting to see. The video comes with narration about why it is so good.

The future is usually thought of as having 'different' things than what's here now, so a vehicle with legs instead of wheels is a great target item. It is slow, but really, logging isn't the fastest process anyway and being able to log on rough ground is great. The tree stripper/slicer appendage is fantastic as well. This isn't at all robotic though, as it is 'driven' by the logger who makes it do everything. (though it does step along on its own)

Legged things also tend to be regarded as 'cool' because they're reminiscent of nature, such as huge bugs or dinosaurs and other things. Also that they can tackle terrain that's at best annoying to wheeled things, or at worst, impassable. But while versaitle, legs are also really hard to implement in robotics/vehicles etc. due to balance.

Hopefully though, this thing's days are numbered.
Numbered by what? Engineered timber-farms, hopefully. Fast growing trees planted on flat easy land that can be harvested and re-planted routeinly to eliminate/cut down on logging in real forests. With easy trees in quick supply it'll mean more natural areas for natre to...do it's thing. Still, until that day comes, this thing is pretty cool to watch in action.

What is it? Timberjack 6 legged logging vehicle
Where is it? Europe/ Forests
Safe? 90% it cuts down trees so...
Cost? Unknown, over $100,000 because it's for companies only

IBM's 5 Technology 5 Years Arguement

2008-11-29T21:02:00.000-08:00

The future could use some of this stuff.
Others...not so much so. It's time for a Technology Argument! What do you say? Who has thought it through? Here's this article for you: http://www.physorg.com/news146852022.html basically 5 advances in 5 years. But some of these seem rather like setbacks...or at least able to foster huge ones.

Solar Panels in ur everything:
Go for it. No argument here. They want to paint everything with solar and then chop down the electric bill? Go right ahead. The only point in the article that if it does what it says, will make stuff even more awesome. Solar clothes chargin' your cell, not a bad plan...if you can put 'em through the washer. That's powered by your solar roof and walls. Nice!

Crystal Ball of Your Health:
Dr can give you either go-aheads or warnings to prevent later-on illnesses. Like if you're prone to high cholesterol, then lay off the Fast Food. Of course that's just the most simple example, there's bound to be lots of others because obviously a helluva lot can go wrong with people.
But:
Who would actually OBEY the thing?
No one.
Smokers know it's bad, yet the world is covered with them. How many over-weight people do you see who are always trying to diet? Plenty of them. They either have to figure the heck out what is the "Fat Gene" or figure out what the heck is wrong with the food around here. (No, really, what IS wrong with the food? We already KNOW artificial sweeteners make you wolf down more food. We already KNOW that the precice combination of sugar and salt can turn off your 'not hungry' button--yet you can find stuff in your cubpoard right now with that ratio on it ON PURPOSE to get you to hork down more!) There's more then "Hurr will power" going on here." There HAS to be. And some 'crystal ball' isn't going to end it.
Also:
Little old lady next door. Suffers diverticulitus. Won't eat healthy fiber each day because 'it tastes bad' or 'she doesn't feel like it'. Suffers every single week because she won't follow directions. (She does fine if eating fiber-rich foods, as all are supposed to) So even in the face of enormous suffering, here's someone proving they won't listen to reason. Crystal Ball? I doubt it.

Talkin' Web:
No no no no. I know people who learned to READ because of Pokemon. Yes the video game & card game. If you couldn't read what sort of things were going to go on with your monsters, you were in trouble. It also taught half the young world that "All books aren't that BS garbage school makes you read". Letters aren't only for studies.
Yes, I too HATED reading. Because I thought every book was that boring, inane, slop they made you start reading in school. If you are old enough you might know "Dick & Jane". Or after "Nitty Gritty City". And when you're only that old....you have no great literary experiences. There's NOTHING on this Earth to make you believe that novels/graphic novels/your fave book series here could be awesome. And school's not gonna tell ya. They'll give you Shakespeare and the Great Gadspy (Gadspy...not great. lame. btw) who are 100% irrelvent to anything you might be into, at that time.

Right now, the internet makes you read. And THAT is a damm good thing. It PROVES reading can be interesting. Fine. Let it talk to blind people, to the disabled, to the busy in their cars perhaps...but let text remain a staple as it can be a better art than speech.

Also If the internet could talk:
It will accuse your mom of horrible things
It will accuse you of being gay
You will hear Dragon Ball Z fans
You can listen to Lemon Fics that never should of been
Do you want to hear 4chan?

Did IBM ever talk to anyone on Xbox Live? I didn't think so. Talking is a blessing and a curse. You tend to have to think before you type (the mere act of it) but talking...nope. And this one's for you Internet Marketers:
What would you rather do?
Listen to some guru for 45 minutes
or
Read his speech in under 10 for all the info, AND take notes?

Reading is ALWAYS faster than listening to something/someone talk. You don't even have to be a speed reader. Talking net is a slow net.

Digital Shopping Assistant:
We already know store employees don't want to help you. While it's not true of all of them, it's been true on enough that the stereotype developed. So this like...shopping assistant could be something useful. Until they said it was a screen they want to put in the fitting room. There's 1 thing that can (and likely will) kill this.
Vandalism.
You post up some awesome little screen in a room with no cameras in it and the first thing anyone evil is going to do is either A) steal the hell out of it instantly or, failing that, B) take out a wide-sharpie and write all over it the second they're done using it. I give it a month after install in some hapless mall somewhere that someone hasn't written "DONGS" on these in a way that totally obscures the screen. On. Every. Single. One. That or "Tammy & Jack 4eva" which is later re-vandalized with a razor blade trying to scratch it off after Jack initiated a break-up.

Fogetting will become a distant memory:
Oh no, forgetting will still happen. IBM posted zero solutions to the actual forgetting part. They list devices (ie cameras/recorders/etc) that will keep track of it for you. So you can still forget stuff, just this NEW stuff will look it up on demand.
And on the uh...recieving end? I guess?
Do you really want your whole convo with Freddy Forgetful recorded? Your photo permenently in someone elses' stash even though your hair was bad that day? And then he'll say "Ah that's nasty-hair-natalie!" when reviewing his i-remember-pod later. Do you want that?
Forget what the cops/lawers would like to do with this stuff on everyone. It's better than a dog-collar. How sincere is everything/anything when some goofy device had to remember it and not them? Until whatever widget can beam that info directly into the persons' brain, there's GONNA be a delay, and whoever's just been forgotten is going to see that they've just been looked up. "Oh yes dear I know it's our............2nd anniversary of........our.......uh.....meeting at (scroll/scroll) the park!"

It'll be very interesting indeed to see where all of this is in 5 years....

Pink Vs. Blue: We're Gettin' Rid of You

2008-11-27T23:20:00.000-08:00

Ah, the future, home of bio-ethical concerns!
And dudes. Lots of dudes.

The 'not so latest' issue comes up again in the form of Pink vs Blue. What's that? Some device that can tell what type (a boy or a girl) that a baby will be only 6 weeks into the term. That particular test is Australian, but there are others that do the same thing, that were invented earlier and in different places. It's just that this sort of new and cleverly named test has brought up the issue again.

So let's take a look at why you want to know what sort the baby will be:
1. You are pre-disposed for gender specific diseases so for instance a boy will be at risk and should be further tested while any girl you may have would be safe and you don't need to drop bundles of cash to test the girl fetus thing.
2. You are curious and can't wait
3. You want to get a jump on buying gender-specific stuff for the baby
4. You only want one type of baby, and if you know that the one you've got isnt it, it's only 6 weeks (I guess to say 'old' but...) you can still eliminate it and try again legally.

Now 3 of those reasons don't really raise any eyebrows but #4....hm.
All parents are supposed to say "Oh no matter what the baby is I will be the happiest parent ever". But you already know they don't. Phrases like "Oh I hope it's a girl, pink dresses!" or "I hope it's a boy, he's got 2 sisters already...." fly around and aren't really "argh!"d over. People DO hope for a baby of a certain variety, no matter where you go! The reasons are as various as the people. They're even not afraid to say so. No one bats an eye at parents hoping for one or the other...so now..that they can actually PICK there's a big fuss for some reason?

So a lot of people in seeing the test shout "ZOMG its totally not right to stamp out babies of genders you don't want arrgh!"

Orly?
The key here is DONT WANT. What if you knew your parents liked you LESS because you weren't the right type of person? How bad would that suck? "Oh we'd of preferred it if you were a girl, but you're not so...meh we raise you anyway o well...." Face it, no one wants to be "that darn ___". It's like you're always second best! "Oh but that never happens" you say?

BS
I was friends with TWO girls who the father had hoped would be dudes. They had one kid, not a dude. Damn. Try again. Still no dude. Unwilling to try again. Without getting into a huge story, yeah, you could tell "he didnt get what he wanted". It doesn't take a degree in psychology to see stuff like that, even when you are very little.

If it can be observed in one state, it can probably be observed anywhere. It's also not likely to be ultra-mega-rare or anything either. Does it mean the parents are somewhat disfunctional?
YES.
If you're so fixed on obtaining a certain type of baby ADOPT ONE. Don't leave it to chance and then whine and punish the innocent. It's not like there's some baby-shortage, infact, there's too many of parentless babies already! It's a sure-fire way to know precicely what you'll get, and it doesn't involve terminating anything.
If it's possible you could "Totally Not Want" a certian type of healthy, normal kid, you shouldn't EVER have ANY sort of kid. Why? Because anyone so set on 'exactly how they're gonna force it to be' is likely going to run head first into dissapointment-town and it'll just upset everyone involved. But there isn't anyone to really say that.

Of course it brings up (but not rly in USA or Canada so much so) the old "GROG" issue. Again.

What is GROG?
Get Rid Of Girls!

In certain places on the Earth, Girls are not considered to be very cool. In fact, people think they're inferior to dudes, just because they are girls. This is a strange notion, because if you look at the general population of...oh, EVERYWHERE either male or female has equal ability to be lame/dumb/weak/boring/mean/spiteful/scheming/clownish/nerdy etc. Inferiority is an equal opportunity striker. ANYone can be uncool, and anyone can be cool. While examples of this are totally obvious it doesn't stop these places from their discriminating ways.

So of course, these places would LOVE this handy test. It would let them stamp out the female menace before it ever arrives on the scene! Everyone could have a boys-only paradise filled with only 100% useful superior males! It'll be awesome! O wait.

It's a little bit short-sighted...for now.
Did they forget where babies come from? Did they forget that guys might like to go on a date with someone who is not another guy? No...it's just a case of passing the buck. "Someone else will have a girl baby" well....apparently that's not always the case. See, if EVERYone says 'someone else' then there is no 'someone else'.

Look at this quote "(According to the pro-choice Center for Genetics and Society, some put the number of "missing girls" in South and East Asia at 100 million.) "

They've apparently avoided the existance of 100 million girls. What's that put the ratio at? 2 dudes for every girl? More? Who knows, and likely there's no tellin'. See, they aren't really missing per se, they were just never born. That's NOT INCLUDING the ones who did get born and were then dumped/killed/posted for adoption/organ-harvested/etc. Because, face it, if someone doesn't want you around, (and you're a baby) they're GOING to find a way to get rid of you. Or you'll wish they had.

So yes, the test is full of bio ethical concerns. It also raises population concerns because what if somewhere finally did get rid of all the girls? It'd be populated for a while but...until they can actually REPLACE girls (with something else) they'd be in real trouble.

The questions are:
Would you rather be selected than not wanted?
Would you like to pick the type of kid, if you were going to have a kid?
Would you rather see happy, selected kids due to the test living with parents who like what type they turned out to be, OR to see random kids the parents are just ok with?
What to tell parents who want to pick the type of kid by ditching one they didnt want?
Do you know anyone who the parent obviously wished was different?

The issue may seem futuristic, but the tools and issues for it are here right now.
Read more? http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/05/experts_say_fet.html#more
Keep an eye out for a sequel-post that goes deep into tinfoil-hat territory...or does it?

A Turkey Story- WHAT are you attracted to?

2008-11-26T23:57:00.000-08:00

It's Thanksgiving...so why not have a turkey story?
Future content and fictitious robots below!

The wild turkey is known for being fast (can sprint faster than a dog for a while) and also somewhat tricky (is reportedly difficult to hunt) Ben Franklin also supposedly wanted it to be the mascot of USA (instead of the bald eagle) as he thought it was smarter. However, the turkey is also not supposed to be too 'clued in' to the world at large. How so? There have been experiments to find out:

Noises:
If you put out a replica of a "turkey enemy animal" IE something that usually hunts/attacks/eats turkeys this will always scare the turky away. It looks mean, it smells mean, it sounds mean, etc.
However if you put out that same replica, and put in it a speaker that makes Turkey-Chicks-Cheep noises, the turky will be nice to it instead. So it totally is dis-regarding what it SEES/Smells/whatever in favor of the sound that's being made. Odd.

But that's not the experiment we're after. This is:
Turky Attractiveness:
How do you know if a male turkey finds something attractive? He'll always gobble and do some kind of little turkey-dance. Presumably, if he doesn't think it's attractive he'll just hang around doing nothing. So testing male turkeys is rather easy. Now, I don't know who conducted the study (sorry no link) but it WAS interesting...and it went like this:

They made up a girl turkey doll. Painted it up just like a real one. With a difference. You could pick the pieces off the doll or do wierd things to it like make the stick 'she's' on be like 3ft high for "giant legs girl" effect. So they started trying to freak out the male turkeys by making this doll un-attractive. Super tall legs. Gobble. Tipped over sideways. Gobble. Etc. So they started pulling parts off the doll. And they got ALL the way to just her HEAD on a POST and he'd still gobble at just her head. She didn't need a body!

And remember, this isn't for some kind of turkey-talking-date...you kind of need a body in order to lay eggs & etc. While humans can no doubt fall in love with a disembodied head if it's intelligent, (due to the whole...talking for hours thing) turkeys presumably do not have the capacity for soul-searching lengthy convos. There for, there isn't any really logical reason for the turkey to court a head on a post that doesn't even respond. Yet they do!

Study conclusion:
Turkeys are wierd.

Actually, I have no idea what the real conclusion was. BUT! For everyone sneering in the general direction of these large odd birds I present to you...

This thing. The Svedka Vodka robot. When you look at it, you can wonder "How many parts of the human girl can they take away or make rediculous/odd...and people will still find it attractive?"

Someone thought it was attractive. Or it wouldn't of been made. It went through rigerous marketing tests. There's lots of media, and it's in loads of ads. Even if YOU personally don't think it is attractive, it DID pass a whole lot of attractivity tests just to be hanging out here on the internet and in the ads.

It may not be a girls' head on a post, but it's quite obviously not a typical human girl...yet here it is, hoping to convince you to buy a drink. It lacks a mess of the things you'd think it'd REQIRE to make it generally attractive to the population at large (uh skin...hair...proportions in realm of possibility...) Yet somehow it's gotten through.

So...much like the large and curious bird so popular at this time of the year...perhaps everyone should think twice.

Mind Control- Already here and getting better! (break out the foil hats?)

2008-11-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

Mind control is already here.
But no need to break out the Tinfoil hats. This is just a generalized 'mind control' post not focused on any one specific thing, more to just intro it in general.

Mind Control-
The ability to make other things do stuff JUST by thinking about it. (oh so specific) Whether the things are pcs, cars, robots, or whatever, they have to be able to be controlled by thoughts alone or it doesn't count.

What's here now?
A low-grade video 'excersise game' (as in not really a 'game' per se, but an animated exercise) you can control by thinking about it. Lift a cube, push a brick, bend a tree, etc. You basically put on a head-device, and then get your thinker started in order to control the game.
Is this really mind control?
Yes, but not in the traditional sense. With this you're not thinking "oh hey I want to bend this tree" you're controling your STATE of mind. Peaceful/Meditation/Happy whatever. The game isn't hearing your mental dialogue or actually really being communicated with in the 'mental' sense, it's reading states-of-mind as button-presses to get virtual things to do stuff.
Why?
Because everyone probably has Reeeeely similar states of mind. They're easy to pick up and not person-specific. A simple-enough device could catch them and then control the game. "Oh look, alpha/beta/etc. waves of meditation...ok...move tree now"

What's wanted for the future?
Well, obviously "Telepathy" type stuff eliminating the need for...well talking normally. Who's after it? Why, the military of course. You could order people around in total silence then. See, you combine the mind-read-o-tron with one of those "hear it thru your jaw bone" devices and really, you can silently tell everyone what to do. Not even a ninja could over hear. They're after something that CAN hear your mental dialogue, and then tell it to other people.

Can it be foil hat time nao? No!
First, they havn't got it yet. Next, no matter WHAT- the person who wants their thoughts broadcast would have to 'train' the system so it'd actually work. So putting it on criminals or something who don't want to use it, it'd fail. Everyone's brain is obviously a little different. I guess the 'talking bit' of the brain will vary among people. You even have to sorta-train the simple one they have now, and it uses really basic stuff only.

What about the listen-with-your-jaw?
It's here too, and it was a bit of a fad. There were lolly pops which had musical handles but no speaker. BUT if you bit the lolly pop top, and pressed the button, sound would carry up the stem, through your tooth, onto your jaw and then your ear would 'hear' it though technically it wasn't really making noise per se. It was vibrating in some special manner which you then interperated as sounds.

This is not the Wonder Years
You might remember a show called The Wonder Years. It followed the life of this kid named Kevin as he went through social situations and school. It had a bit of a gimmic too, which was that you could hear his 'inner voice' also called 'self dialogue' as a part of the show. BUT if you think about it, hardly anyone is like that. Do you really go through the day discussing with no one all the things that are going on? A likely bet for most people is 'not really'. Thoughts are mostly concepts, pictures, and imagined scenarios. An occaisional "Oy dammit!" will go through, and of course you're thinking along with your words as you talk but...it's not the Wonder Years.

With this article here: http://www.mindpowernews.com/ArmyMindControl.htm you can read more about what they're hoping for and the rather dubious concept of 'thinking loudly'.

Lame Scenario:
Apply this thing to Xbox 5000 (the future) and then people can accuse you of being gay just by THINKING about it. Brilliant! That way their mom won't hear them swearing you off because you captured the flag, camped the gnome or whatever.

Better scenario:
Controling machines with your mind. That means the Luke Skywalker hand would work pretty much like it did in the movies, and so would new legs/feet/arms/whatever. If they can detect your inner dialogue, surely they can figure out where 'mv arm' comes from and translate that to something that'll actually move the arm.

The bottom line is that mind control is and can be really cool and helpful. However, it's likely never going to have comic book type mind control rays or distance mind reading devices.

Want to know more about the current stuff?
EmotivSystems are the guys with the helmet, and the US Military are the ones with the plan. The above article link (from TIME originally) also has some more.

Yu-Gi-Oh (cardgames) Let's Get Real!

2008-11-14T20:03:00.000-08:00

More of a 'proof of concept' than a real "go and get one!"
But, none-the-less it's quite still cool to see. First off, watch this rather annoying video: (it's shrill, so be sure to turn down sound)

So it's basically this little cube with the equivelent of a barcode on it that a program can easily recognize. When you watch on your monitor, it overlays the animation with the scene on your webcam that contains the cube. (producing the girl) So you watch the monitor (much like a mirror) in order to have interactions. It's totally fascinating that you can also lift the cube and move it around to view many angles of whoever is currently atop it. Rather than virtual reality, it's "Augmented Reality" where in something is over-laid onto vision. IE: if you were wearing a visor, you'd always see her.

But...really now...It wouldn't be my first thought (nor 50th) to nettle a tiny girl with a stick, should one somehow arise from a magic cube like some kind of miniature genie. Yet, that's just about all that goes on in this video? She's so shrill too, you'd think they'd learn not to jab her when the dogs of the house start wailing. Yes, the stick has a symbol on it as well, and one even has a little hand so you can steal her clothes. (? well just go get a barbie instead, those don't have fits when you take it off)

So what's this got to do with YuGiOh and other fighting type card games?
Well, they proved the 'cards' could be recognized by the program too, they produced clothing and toys for her. Well, what if you had a whole deck like that, trained the camera on the "play Mat" and had the whole thing on TV?

BAM! Dark Magician is doing battle right on your surface! People could summon kuribo to the coffee table any time they wanted. In the TV show, such battles were always done with Seto Kaiba-fueled holograms (or actual magic) and this whole 'watch the screen for real action' is pretty darn close to the hologram part. No, they're not in a stadium or as big as you are, but being able to play cards and watch the actual monsters do battle on your table is still far, far sweeter than some miniature maid who doesn't even clean anything.

You can't tell me that something like that wouldn't be a total hit.
Dice could be made to work with it too, as well as the cards. Since you can lift the box, it'll know who's lifting the cards and where. Tournaments would get interesting really quickly too, turning it into a bit more of an appealing spectator type thing than it has been before. It'd work with anything Pokemon, Yugioh...maybe even Magic Gathering decks?

And what about other stuff?
Nintendogs is oddly popular and it's a game about puppies or something. Who wouldn't want to pet a virtual puppy who's interacting on your desktop? Little tabs for hands, brushes, food bowl cards...you could even make it feel dumb by dressing it up! (Pet on my Desk? Kitten in the Box?) There's a zillion things to be done with this to gobble up people's time and cash. Yeah...if a torchic came out of the box...I might have to get it.

See something like it?
If you watch on Discovery Channel in the USA the show "Prototype This!" (guys build new and sometimes wacky concepts to see if it can be done) you can see something VERY close to this in action. In order to track a person's movements easily, a certain black & white design is applied to their back. The webcam/pc set up then "Sees" and recognizes the shape. It creates a virtual 3D cube on top of the paper...and then proceeds to track how the cube moves and tilts, according to the angle of the paper. Watching some simple cube is a lot easier than kitting someone out in the black suit with the motion-tracker balls all over it that you see in special effects extras. It served their purpose pretty well, while proving this sort of thing will work.

If tinygirl-in-cube technology is any easy to make...cardgames and other exciting things have a bright future indeed.

What is it? Dennou AR Figure
Where is it? Japan
Now? Yes, this is a commercial, presumably you can buy it currently
Safe? 100% (she's not real)
Cost? Unknown.

The Futureberry! Or something.

2008-11-11T19:52:00.000-08:00

If the photo doesn't get your attention...then you don't need the post!
What kind of berry madness is this?
Hopefully you're not here for that answer because it is pretty much a mystery. Apparently Russia and surrounding areas are getting these crazy berries. Obviously it is a strawberry...an x-treme strawberry! Not even Cap n' Crunch could come up with something like this.

For some reason strawberry plants in and around Russia have JUST started doing this with their berries. They weren't doing it before (obviously, or someone would have noticed) Are they evolving? Are they mutating? How do plants just "up and decide" to do something so trendy and different like this? And then they all get on the bandwagon? Start asking the science teacher because all that's here are theories.

What has happened?

Well, for every seed there is now a leaf. The leaf resembles the actual leaf of the strawberry plant, right down to being lightly fuzzy. A strawberry is the only berry (that really is common or eaten or...) that has seeds on the OUTSIDE of the fruit. It was already unique.

Why would it go like this?

It disguises the fruit:

That's a bad reason, because the plant wants animals to eat the fruit and carry the seeds away to spread them around. That's why it's red anyway. It would be easier to turn all strawberries to green then to put out silly leaves all over. It's not like the plants were frusterating away after everyone comes and eats their hard work.

Global Warming:

The strawberry thought it was going to bake away on the vine, so here come leaves to shade it. Yeah well this doesn't work either because Russia may have gone up 1 degree (or not) and certainly it's berries weren't burning up. It still isn't tropical there.

Ozone Hole:

Berries were irradiating and the seeds were exposed (duh, outside of fruit) so let's protect them with leaves. Well...maybe, but that's rather obtuse.

Is the futureberry better?

Likely no. Who wants to 'de leaf' every strawberry before you eat it? Surely since no one has strawberry-plant leaf salads now scarfing down a mess of fuzzy leaves isn't the best idea. It creates more trouble in preparing it.

Is it going to come here?

Not likely. All the strawberries affected by this were presumably wild. And Russia is pretty far away from places like the USA and South America where a lot of Strawberries are grown...so whatever is making them do that is not likely to get so far.

Where did the photo come from?

A search on pies. Only a few sentances were legible on the page and now it's gone...but a new site has it too: http://www.englishrussia.com/ however it is just as puzzled.

The future is all about change. Some changes bring things foreward, some set things back...and some, apparently just go sideways. However, it is the job of science to look into interesting changes such as this for the 'why' and the 'how'. And, with nature all around us being so full of surprises and new discoveries, it doesn't look like anyone will run out of questions any time soon. And this, is all the better!

And in closing, I totally dare someone to eat one of these things.

Refrigervision: What's inside?

2008-11-06T18:46:00.000-08:00

Is there anything that CANT be made better by adding a color vid-screen to it?

Looking around 'future' scenarios, the answer to that is 'nearly nothing'. After all, just look around today. Copiers, cars, maybe your printer, and even the bathroom is benefiting! (At least at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas...they have a TV in the BR!) The future, of course, has them portrayed on the sides of sufficiently sized buildings, in bus stops and even on the sides of busses! But, a lot of people also wanted a TV in the kitchen.

Cook along with cooking shows

Watch something else while waiting for food to heat up

Don't miss Show X because you had to fix dinner

So a while back you saw the release of Refrigervision: fridge with a TV built into the door. Practical? ....maybe. sorta? But if it breaks you have a fridge with a black rectangle in it. It surely solved the TV on the counter situation while making a fridge cost more. Certainly though, this combo-item already counts as the futuristic version of your regular food-temperature-lowering device.

The one above is from LG, though it'll set you back 4 grand--it'll also tell you the weather outside and the temperature inside itself on little screens. That's rather handy...because who wants to wait on the weather channel, or go on the internet to find out.

So this is a futuristic item...and it's here now! (for a price) But where is it going? (no no this isn't a "is your fridge running" gag) Well, it's long been a dream of marketers to find out what's really in your fridge. And with this thing in most houses, that dream may be ready to come true. But what if you don't want your fridge knowing what's inside? (and why would you want it to not?) More on that in a minute...let's look at the HOW first.

Remember when it mentioned that it knew the weather in your area?

Well, it's certainly not looking out the kitchen window. The thing is hooked up to wireless internet some-how to download it's handly little weather reports. So it has a nice wifi inside which hooks up onto LG's (presumably) weather reporting online gizmo. Well, that's not a far step from being able to actually get the whole internet on the thing, or at least have it capable of making a list of what's inside.

RFID

(Radio Frequency ID) are little cheap chips, which, when they get cheaper than they are now, will go onto just about everything. Supposedly they work by letting detectors detect them when brought quite close. (Like, inches away, or they're not powerful enough) so if every label of your groceries had one of these things in it, just the act of putting it in the fridge would 'scan it in' letting your fridge build your shopping list for you. And also alerting interested parties of what you like to buy. If it was on the internet, it could even order new things for you, when the old ones begin to run out. Handy!

Yeahbut:

"Yeahbut" the term is just what it sounds like. All futuristic things aren't 100% handy and awesome. There's sometimes a shadow of danger lurking around them, either for misuse or suspiciousness of some kind. It's this kind of stuff that the Tin Foil Hatters like to jump all over and sensationalize in the media. It's this blog's job to expose stuff like that, provide balance, or actually help you put a cold shoulder on things which deserve it.

Misuse of the fridge!

1. Health Insurance-

Are you buying unhealthy food? Get one too many gallons of ice-cream this year? Do you like to stock up on Mountain Dew? Health insurance companies would LOVE to know if you're pigging out so they can jack your rates up. This fridge will have the ability to tell them.

A) Foil Hat?

No. This is already going on. You know those "Shopper Discount" cards that super markets have? Little key-tabs or swipe cards for coupons and discounts. Yeah, they're reporting everything you buy. There was even a news story about it a while back where some over-weight woman had her health insurance rates go up because someone 'up there' was watching her card. Oy. Watch the privacy statement small print now...

B) Circumstance

The fridge doesn't know you have relatives in, who are gobbling up your food. It doens't know that uncle Vern loves his butter-pecan. It has no idea you have 4 teenage boys in the house. It's going to blame you and you can't stop it. It's likely (that like the shopper card above) it'll have about the same amount of info relating to it's owner as the card does. (who are you, where do you live, general # of family members etc)

C) Stop It

Yes. Finding and ripping the RFIDs out of your labels before putting things in there. Also the use of fresh veggies and fruits will work well too. (which, everyone should eat more of these anyway so...)

D) Whoops

I don't know about you, but there ends up being many experimental items in the fridge here. New pomagranite drink? You bet. Halo flavored Mountain Dew? Why not. Testing the taboule? Surely so. But what if you dont WANT that item again? You don't want your appliance getting in your grill trying to remind you to pick up more bittertastic mistake-cola. So at best, the thing would only be good for staples like possibly milks, a fave cola brand or broccol---deletedeletedelete! n/m.

E) Advertising

You bet that thing is going to show ads for the food it knows you own--and related items. "So I see you like pomagranites....try new Arils For All!"

Benefits:

Helps you not drive around too much when you leave stuff off your list. It's got you covered.

Won't let "That Jerk" drink up NEARLY all the OJ and then put the carton back and not tell anyone

Might let you know about some food that is good that you wouldn't of gotten otherwise

Will heckle you about expiry dates so there's no 'milk mistake' on your cereal

Generally raises shopping convenience

Verdict:

Refrigervision is benign, as it is now. Intelligent refrigervision is NOT. The kind of "Big Brother" elements to it far outweigh the conveniences it'd provide for most people. Everything it can do, you can do too, if you take 5 damm minutes in your day. Of course, there are always circumstances that fall to either end of the scale, but on the whole, I don't think anyone's going to want to face higher healthcare premiums because of some arbitrary "5 mayo limit".

Robot Overlord Weighs In:

Yes, but you SHOULD have to pay more money every month to keep your health coverage if you're horking down tubs of the Chunky Monkey and Cherry Garcia. If you're going to act terrible and endanger your health my enforcer drones should be 100% allowed to come to your house and extort the money from your rubbery hide. After all, the weight watchers and health concious shouldn't have to pay for the butter-consumers' fatty sins. Once the computron decides on the appropriate food-ratio for everyone, each should be contained in their pens eating only the approved items in the proper amount!

Of course the Robot Overlord has a point (it always does) but no one likes the point. Naturally you're replacing the word "Computron" with "Government" as to who is setting the limits on what you should and shouldn't be eating. And we all know that 'the government' or 'healthcare insurance provider' is super great at setting limits, keeping them, and knowing what's best for everyone. (scoff/scoff)

Will it get that far?

Yeaprobly. It's easy enough to do now, the only thing stopping this thing is the cost of refrigerators with all that gadgetry shoved in them, and the RFID'ing of "just about everything" because it'd jack up the cost too badly. The solution to that, of course is, WAIT. General gadgetry, chips, and related things tend to get cheaper as time goes on. And when that happens, they get more ubiquitous (in everything).

TV In Mah Fridge

Now? 100%
Safe? 100%

Available/Affordable? 90% It's still expensive for 'average' consumers
Bogus-o-meter? 0% They've got 'em working now

Learn More? Easy as a trip to an appliance store or a google search

Smart Drugs in UR Skool?

2008-10-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

Ever since there has been school...someone has wanted an easier time in it.
All the way from back in the day where you could write the notes to the chapter on the bottom of your shoe (and then spy on it during the test) to the likes of today where you can write in the equasions inside your graphing calculator (to hint you during the test) everyone wants an edge.

Of course, those are very obvious things, and they are ways of the present and the past. But! Leave it to some company somewhere to come up with the (somewhat dubious) edge for the future. So called "Smart Drugs". A "Smarntess Pill" would be the second real "Enhancement Pill" sprinkled onto the world at large. What's the first? Why, Viagra/Cialis of course. So to get things going, let's cook up some definitions!

Enhancement Medicine=
A type of medicine that you take to either fix something non-vital, or to get 'better' at something. A steroid (in some cases) can be enhancement. Viagra always falls into this catagory. (No, it isn't vital to have sex you can easily go your whole life without it and fail to die of sexlessness...it doesn't happen.)

Smarterizing yourself=
A pill will never, ever make someone smarter just by taking it. Unless it somehow enables people to learn through osmosis. (and even then you'd have to lay down on the library) The only way you're going to get smarter with a pill is if:
1. It lets you stay up later without consequence so you can apply yourself and learn more
2. It lets out more of the chemical widget that links up so that long-term memories are easier to create
3. It somehow makes med-term/short term memories easier to create (this will allow you to remember all the stuff you need out of the chapter)

So the basics are that no matter what you're horking down, you've still got to be able to apply yourself. No pill is ever going to make you want to study fractions or something. But still, something like that could help out...

The thinktank "Futurelab" was paid by someone to ponder this, and came up with the question of "Haves vs Have Nots". Like, rich kids will do better in school because their parents bought them Smartix by the bucketfull, so even if they're normally dense as a brick, when test time comes they can basically photo-memory all the pages they need and ace it.

Crackpottery!
These thinktanks usually churn out just as much crackpottery as they do interesting/plausable things. Other things they came up with: DNA on memory sticks for students! (yea THERES an idea, "don't bother to teach little Sally Smith over there, she's prone to liver cancer so she's just gonna DIE and waste all your efforts!")
Also teachers watching over real-time brain scans of the students and then changing their lessons accordingly. Well, that wont' work either because no one's ever going to be able to make adding uneven fractions any interesting at all. The skill is useless because of Google and calculators. Oh and all the "HUR what if theres no pcs and no batteries left on Earth!!? HUH?" people can talk to the T-800, because if there's no PCs and something un-charged all the batteries you've got bigger problems than "What is 5/8 + 7/22" ?

Now?
Yeah...kinda. You can take Ritalin even if you don't have ADD and it either helps you or placebos you into being helped. Modafinil (anti narcolepsy...I think) can be used to stay awake one night because you were naughty and weren't studying at a reasonable hour on the nights you should of been. (whoopsie!)

Haves Vs. Have-Nots
Ok this is a big one, and might even spawn a whole post at some point. The whole issue is that "Rich people might get their hands on more pills than poor people". So obviously the solution is to make sure EVERYONE is a have-not by never making anything. After all, if every single person on earth can't access it, then no one should be able to access it. When looked at that way, it doesn't stay 'haves vs have-nots' it so easily flips over and reveals itself to be punishing everyone because a few people can't ____. (whatever) It's also near to communism. Communism re-distributes wealth to everyone, making sure that people get paid whether they earn it or not (so no one wants to earn it) and making sure that people can't ever get ahead.

Doomsday?
The above might look like 'yay for smartpillz'...but will they create some sort of wierd dystopian era? Like where you have to eat pills to keep your job vs. Peppy the pill popper over in the other cubicle? Certainly, that wouldn't be good. As with any emerging thing, the first people to take it long-term are the first ones to find out if/what there are any side effects. It's actually impossible to get a wide enough test-bed of people to test anything on currently. Unless it was like 1 million dudes, you're not going to get everything answered about your latest medicine.

It's certainly not going to wreck school. All you need to beat someone on a pill (at this point) is actual responsibility. If you study however much you need to, when you should, you'll do just as well. You won't NEED to stay up for 24 hours because you used the far more important tool called "Good Planning". Work hard, work smart and you won't need crazy pills to get ahead. Rich kids can flop while poor kids excel-- it's the determination of the person's core that's going to determine how far they get, not some pill.

The only 'uh oh' factor is in a workforce type environment where staying up all hours could benefit someone. Like if you got paid for how many items you put together, how much code you wrote or something like that...and you just went like 24 hrs on it.

The question is...
Will these things stick if they do get made? Signs point to yes...currently. However it'd have to be on par with Viagra both in ability to work for nearly everyone and in 'side effects aren't so bad' areas. Personally, I vote 'yes' on getting something like that out there. Would I use it? No. I don't need it.

Safe? 80% Current ones- fairly. Future? Who knows.
Affordable? 98% most people can afford a tablet or two
Now? 40% current medicines are for other purposes/not specialized, they dont do enough
Bogus-o-meter? 5% Someone's going to make up something. Hella money in that.
Learn More? Not really. Idea too nebulous until a press release.

The Lawgiver: Coming soon to a gunfight near you?

2008-10-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

Well, not really.
The Lawgiver is the name of the gun Judge Dredd uses in his comic book series. The name is appropriate because "Street Judges" are licensed to be the judge/jury/executioner of any criminal they find. They can sentance the person and take them in, or if the crime is bad enough, shoot them on the spot. The gun 'gives the law' (AKA- a shootin') to criminals who get in the way of Judge Dredd in the Megacity. It can shoot different bullets depending on what you tell it. (Yes, it's voice activated---hardly ideal in the middle of noisy gun fights but still...) It contains many kinds of fictitious rounds, as well as real rounds. It also has a DNA encoded safety/trigger lock so that only that particular judge can use it. (Makes sense)

So if the Lawgiver hasn't just been invented, what's all this then?
Well, guns have looked the same for quite a long time. They've also pretty much DONE the same thing for a long time. Machine guns do it faster, railguns go faster still...and rifles do it more accurately. But other then that, there havn't really been any (real) new twists on them that have stuck. There's no phasers or laser pistols, there aren't plasma shooters or photon cannnons. It's just making metal widgets go really quick and hit things. Guns even look mostly the same.

Key note: That have stuck.
The Germans in one of the wars did a gun with a curvy barrel to shoot around corners! (though not well) A blunderbuss looks kind of like a shotgun but has a big cone on the end of the barrel (there's a reason they're not used any more) and of course various novelty guns like the Umbrella Shooter (easy to imagine) and hidden Belt Buckle Pistol (easy to hide) but none of it was practical enough to stay around.

This gun shows it may be time for a change. The Register took a photo too, (click to see it)
First off, it LOOKS different. This looks like some kind of future-gun. It's not even the pixel-camo coating, it's that the whole thing is in some sort of space-shell. Army of the future? It would have something similar looking. Maybe something out of a sci-fi theme video game.

But, it's futuristic inside too.
As you can read in that article, you can stuff it with all sorts of specialty bullets (a la'Dredd). These are pretty great because even if some badguys like terrorists or something get their hands on your ammo, it won't fit in anything but this! So it's not like AK-47 or something where there's like a zillion of them out there.

Ammo advantage:
The bullets can be set to have some kind of fuse inside and then explode. This is useful because if there is some dude -beside- a window in a very thick wall, you can't shoot him. But if you shoot thru the window and make the bullet explode in the middle of the room, it will likely get him. Or you can have it wait until it is inside some object like a wall or a crack or something and then have it go off to clear it out of the way.

Multi-bullet advantage:
If the different kinds are easy to change around, you could go from regular big pointy bullet to exploding bullet to non-lethal rubber bullet to pepper-exploding-terrible-noise-bullet in just seconds. When you don't know what you'll find, options always help. These are supposed to appear in 2009, but obviously they've got a few all-right working ones now or they wouldn't have them outside in photos.

Safe? 0% it's a gun that shoots exploding bullets
Affordable? ? Unknown. It seems for the USA military only, will someone make a regular one?
Now? 90% well, a few now, but with 2009 only 2 months away it's pretty soon to see the rest. It gets points off because the idea was started in the 1990s and sidelined. Will it make it this time?
Bogus-o-Meter? 5% It will have to prove it can do 'bullet variety', but seems very possible!
Learn More? Not so much so...it's the military project.

Real Estate...of the Future! Palm Jumeirah

2008-10-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

Real Estate.
It's not really something futuristic, if you just think about it regularly. But certainly a crazy man-made island shaped like a palm tree will change anyone's mind! That's right, you can now buy real estate on the Palm Jumeirah.

(Link leads to picture, not sales pitch for a house) Basically, Dubai the country got a flash of brilliance one day. The country isn't so big, so it didn't have a lot of beach front property to attract people in. Did they get mad and start posting up laws everywhere? (like the usa) No! They went wild and built an island shaped like a palm tree so everyone on it has the beachfront! A high tech and awesome solution. It added something like 45 miles of beachfront, making fun times more accessable to everyone.

Why is it futuristic?
Any people who are able to change the actual land-structure of their planet has to be pretty darn advanced. You can see them fairly easily from space too, so that's pretty cool. It's also one of three palms, and it isn't the biggest. The other palms are called Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Diera.
There's also "The World" which is an imitation of the continents of the world, done on a much smaller scale to make a real-life big map! (that world video tries to make you want to go there, though)

But how logical is it?
Pretty darn. It's shallow there. They're not going to ruin/interrupt fish/whales whatever or kill the environment. Hurricanes don't occur there, and it's pretty free of earthquakes/volcanoes. The gulf doesn't get tsunamis. It's also shallow, so it's not too bad to build up from the bottom. Really the structure is pretty (which counts for a lot) and does what it says quite well (provide beachfront) They're also going about it quite smartly, with breakwaters all around and easy access bridges. It seems quite safe.
The other bit is someone actually thinking ahead, which is that the oil is going to run out. They have to post up something awesome in order to get money. Obviously they can't farm or dig up any minerals...it's too dry and there aren't any. But they got pro-active and made a stand for tourism by attempting to make the place ultra-awesome.

This video helps explain it, though it was made when it wasn't even completed. Palm Video.

What could stop it?
Nothing really. It's done, and the others are worked on in 2008. But tourists? The whole "It's Muslim" is the only other "Anti" factor going for it aside from that it is likely to be quite expensive.

Whether or not anyone likes it, fears and predjudice exist in the world in 2008. When bad people do crazy things, bigger groups can get blamed. Like if the "KKK" or someone like that is acting up and doing crimes in an area, everyone will be afraid to go there. The whole area gets blamed for the actions of a few nutters on a mission. It's not cool, but it happens.

Plus there's the whole thing that "It has Muslim law on it" because that can be ill-explained in the rest of the world, people don't know what it's all about. Horror stories make for good news, like people throwing rocks at girls and that women have been persecuted. You don't hear about normal every-day citizens just doing ordinary things and being helpful. This just helps frighten tourists away from it.

However, if they can build an island where there wasn't one, can they tackle and take down these issues too? Hopefully so! But none-the-less the whole project is futuristic and cool.

Palm Islands:
Safe? 100% Looks like an ok place to hang out on
Affordable? 50% if you can afford beachfront somewhere expensive, then yes, so it's normal enough
Now? Yes, you can find real-estate ads for it if you google it
Bogus-o-meter? 0% It's real, it's now, and it's working.
Learn more? Yes, just google or youtube the word for lots of content.

Letting the Big Dog Out

2008-10-23T23:07:00.000-07:00

If you're into technology at all, you've probably heard of Big Dog.

But if not...

Big Dog is a robot by Boston Dynamics. It's less like a dog and more like a pack animal. It's meant for you to put heavy things on so it'll carry them around all sorts of terrain. It should help the US military. This alone wouldn't be all that remarkable. However, what IS amazing is that this is a legged machine. And I don't mean like Asimo the slow careful mini astronaut looking thing. This will trot along at a good clip, and has a remarkable ability to stay on it's 'feet' (it actually has sort of stump-hooves rather than a type of foot) through hills, being kicked in the side, and across ice and gravel. It is this remarkable ability (not really shared yet by anything else) that helps earn it's claim to fame.

If you havn't seen it yet, by all means watch this video!

Big Dog Robot Video

The video is pretty self-explanatory. You can hear it, see what it does, and think about what it might be good for. (with the ability to carry over 300 lbs, you could prob even make it carry someone who broke their leg or something) And while it is mega cool to see and also likely to be way-useful once they finish fine-tuning it (or whatever) let's explore the bit that you don't get to read about often!

Psychology:
With over 6 million views on Youtube, you can bet that there's plenty of zany comments for you to look through. But if you look at them, and the various articles about this thing on the web you notice a trend...most people think it's scary! Words like "horrifying" "Skynet" and "Metal Gear" start flying around although this is supposed to be a harmless pack-mule. So why all these reactions? (and they are strong ones)

Let's look at how robots scare humans:

Uncanny Valley- Looks like a human but not quite...uh oh!
Can look like a zombie- likely everyone is afraid of the risen-dead, if they're presented with a real enough example face to face. It doesn't matter how many rotting faceless nurses you shot with an AK47 in some game, when the real thing is at your door, you're not likely to be calm about it.
Looks like a prickly pinchy alien- self explanatory...
Looks EXACTLY like a real human but isn't- This just makes it suspicious, and can induce the fear of dopplegangers being anywhere
Looks like a real XX but isn't- again, paranoia inducing "What if that's not my cat...." etc.
Is made to resemble something scary- ie. spiders, snakes, needle weilding octopus etc.
Is immense- well big things are likely to wreck things you like with greater ease

Does this Big Dog fit into any of the above basic ways robots scare humans? No!
Then what is everyone finding about it that's so frightening? For that, you have to look into a rather obscure fear-causer factor in humans, which is the "Familiar but Not" factor.

When you're expecting one thing, and then don't get it, it trips some kind of trigger for a lot of people. On paper it SOUNDS really dumb. Dumb examples shoot out everywhere like
"Oh here are 3 upside-down cups: I expect a strawberry to be under this one, but I lifted it and here's a peach! I'm not going to go hide under my bed now." That case is more like a magic trick, which humans think are amusing.

So what makes Familiar-But-Not so scary?
It might need psycology to figure that out. But a likely guess would be that because everyone's brain is trained to quickly recognize and then catagorize things for easier thinking, that if you wreck this process with some wierd device (like a Big Dog) you're doing several things at once:

Presenting some bizzarre new catagory to figure out
Fundamentally telling someone YOURE WRONG in a very loud way
Pressing the "it could be a predator" button that's left over from cave-men (due to the size of it. If it were only 5 inches high, it could still be creepy but no one would be having the same level of fits)

Being unable to catagorize something right off is dangerous because you're less likely to figure it out in time to do something about it. Being wrong is dangerous because you could act wrongly when presented with a situation. Something as large as you are or larger could be dangerous because it could have an edge in a fight or a chase. All things deemed "dangerous possibility" by the brain are likely to cause fear.

Naturally, no one's going to pin down why each individual who is afraid of Big Dog is afraid of it...because it's personal. But you can sure as heck get close! Isn't that interesting. In this list, actual quotes are quoted:

1. With the way it moves you're expecting "life" (for it to be alive) but then...it isn't!
"Once I figured out it wasn't performance artists in a suit I ____ brix!" Also there's no head and the legs are kind of spindly for it. When it slips on the ice, it really looks like there might be some kind of human in it trying to get back up. You've seen humans fall before, it looks rather like that.

2. It moves in such a way that's sort of familiar for animals, but then isn't. The front legs are kind of like the back legs turned backwards. It has a 'butt' it has knees...but then the front ones are more 'arms' then legs which you don't get in animals who look like that. If you look at a horse or a mule or something the front "Knees" are actually wrists. Their elbows are right up next to their body. The bottom bendy part above the hoof is a finger joint and the hoof is their finger nail.

Big Dog has elbows there. It's like a "Freaky Mutant" animal, you don't want it near you.

3. It makes an odd noise. "OMG it's powered by angry hornets!" If a motor-scooter was making that sound, no one would bat an eye. But the fact that it could come storming down the street buzzing like angry bees has the ability to frighten people. (especially bee-phobia people obviously)

4. You can anthropomorphise it easily because it's so animal like. You can see all kinds of different aspects being pushed onto it in the comments:
There are people who feel sad for it when the man kicks it. There are people convinced that it will remember the kick as abuse and attempt revenge. There are people who want to invite it over for tea.

And of course when that road is started down, and the robot is in any way "freaky" or whatever, the road often ends with it trampling grandma or working for Skynet.

5. It turns loose wild speculation. "Well you think it's harmless NOW....wait until there's a machine gun on top!" Immideatly the "If they can make this..." goes down all manner of wacky paths like arming it with guns turrets, making a huge one and setting it to trample cars, or attaching a terminator-torso to the front to create a centaur! (of course it's holding guns too)

6. The fear that someone's going to abuse it. "What if the commies get it?!" Naturally if it's big, wierd, and robotic it somehow causes people to think of the worst use for it they can.

So, nearly as fascinating as Big Dog itself are the reactions of the public citizens of everywhere! (The USA may have invented this thing, but the video is available anywhere) And really, exposing something like this on the internet and allowing comments is really a fascinating thing. One could likely write some kind of paper based on stuff like that. Youtube is honest. It's commented upon by real people, without solicitation. As technology advances in the future, it'll be ever more fascinating to watch stuff like this come up and be talked about!

Big Dog
Safe? 95% (if unarmed) yes it could probably step on your foot or be used to knock you down. It is not faster than you, and it will tire before you will.
Available/Now? 100% Yes there's probably more than one now.
Affordable? N/A it's not really 'finished' enough yet
Practical? 90% It does what it says (carry things) however it is limited by battery life and will not out-do something like a live mule yet
Bogus-o-meter? 0% it's real.
Learn more? Yes. Website: http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

What do you think of all this?

X-Tra Life - The Food of the Future

2008-10-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

What do you think about when you think of "Futuristic Food"?

Maybe that freeze dried ice-cream bits astronauts eat? Or how about new fruits from alien civilizations? Maybe even (and more commonly) "Soldier Pills" or some kind of tablet, where you can eat just one and get all the nutrition for your day. References for such pills can be found in a mess of sources because in concept they SEEM simple enough, and also in concept they're "Edgy" enough to warrant some raised eyebrows in watchers and readers. Where can you find such things in media?

Naruto- A popular anime featuring Ninjas in a world where some magic is indeed possible. Soldier pills are construced from herbs and nutrients. They're convenient on missions, but as Sakura knows, they don't always taste good.

Video Games- "Health Packs" don't quite count, but there are examples in many games of some kind of nutrition cube which usually has restorative effects for your character. In Phantasy Star Universe (on Xbox and PS2) you can find the named item "Perori Mate" which claims it "Has all necisary nutrition for the day"

Books- Absolutely. The concept of this whole thing likely originated in sci-fi novels anyway.

Of course these things aren't all rosy...
There's the issue of horrible flavors and possible side effects. Plus, what would you do if you had to sit down to a 'meal' with the family and all that's on the plate is a little white tablet? And how does the tablet convince you you're full? That wouldn't be any fun, especially when the boss wants you to use tablets instead of lucnh. Everyone's lunch-break is now only 2 minutes long! Now THERE'S an effect no one wants to see.

How about having one now?
Sorta. There are of course efforts by the USA Military to create such things for the soldiers who likely use MRE (Meal Ready Eat) of which the flavor could be a bit....off and perhaps also these are heavy and big. (bigger than a pill really) There's also Nutri-Loaf which is served in solitary prison...because it's a cube that "Smells like boiled vomit" and has the consistancy of cardboard. Well it's made of like bread loaves and 2 cans of spinach, so it can't be any good. And it's still a pretty big cube. You're not going to pocket it. (and if you try, you'll need Febreeze fabric spray)

The Closest Thing:
Is X-Tra Life. "Video Game Energy Food". It makes sense because what sort of a person doesn't want to get up/stop to eat? A video game player. A truck driver too, but I guess those aren't on the internet as much as gamers. They're not going to stop the epic quest with their Paladin in order to cook up a grilled cheese, no matter how hungry they get.

So what does it do?
A remarkable amount. PLUS the one thing that no tablet or chemical concoction ever was able to pull off: Convince you you're full safely. If you eat an X-Tra Life packet (pretty much tear it open and dump it in your mouth) you get the same protien that's found in meat (only it doesn't go bad, and you don't need to cook it!) More calcium than milk (only without the whole lactose thing...or again...having it go bad because you set it out) fiber, all the B vitamins, boron, some trace minerals and more omega 3 oil than in salmon. Plus more.

Tastes like heck?
That's the other remarkable bit. No. It tastes like whatever you want. Now THATS something futuristic. It will taste like whatever you put it in, including your cola / juice /sandwich / ice cream or whatever. It has somewhat of a flavor amplifying effect though, so slight caution there. (IE dont put it in your nasty un-filtered tap water)

So what is it really?
X-Tra life is seeds. Once again, nature beats science (at least so far) In the same way that honey won't spoil (its the one manufactured item that won't EVER go bad, supposedly.
Side note:
Supposedly the honey in Egyptian mummy tomb jars is still good to this very day. So long as it's not exposed to evaporate, it'll be good for like ever...meaning you could still use it right now though it's over 4,000 years old--if you don't mind risking Status Effect: /Cursed .)

It makes sense that a seed would be the real king-item in nutrition though, out of all the natural things you can wolf down. If you think about it, any seed has to have everything to grow a whole plant for a -while- before the roots even get going. It's going to be packed with the best stuff that's out there...it just seems these seeds are better than all others at it.

But how about this fullness thing...
Yes yes that too. When exposed to any liquid the seeds form gel (like jello) on the outside. This makes them 9x the original size. Eat a tablespoon of them? That's 9 tablespoons of gel and you're full. Keep right on raiding the ogre castle/drag racing/or Smash Brothers Brawling. None of that annoying "Cooking" or "Cleaning" nonsense to put up with when you open a pack into your soda.

Item Alert:
Safety? 100% totally safe
Affordability 100% (a dollar a day you eat pack/day for a month)
Now? 100% you can order it this minute
Bogus Meter - 0 - it does what it says
Learn more? Yes http://www.x-tralife.com/ (Picutres also)

A Fan of the Future

2008-10-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

How can someone be a fan of the future?

It's not really something that comes up. Sportsfans? Sure. Futurefans? Not so much so. But anyway, it's certainly possible. Maybe you're one too and you didn't know it yet. First though, let's take a look at why someone might be a fan of the future:

Looking at futureisim, sci-fi or anything with tech/items/life we don't have right now tends to be pretty cool. Who wouldn't want Star Trek transporters, a car like KITT that drives itself or a PC that looks like a pretty girl (A Chobit)? You see those things and dream about having them now, or that they'll be there for you quite soon.

The future is usually some mysterious place that is even BETTER than anything that's here now. Stuff is always improving it seems, just look at PCs! So learning about what's to come is usually quite exciting especially if it resembles something out of a work of fiction. It may even be scary, like in the Terminator series with creepy machines. Or super fun, like having your own Holodeck. What awesome thing will turn up next? That's where the fun is!

Plus, futuristic technology tends to amaze when you see it. It's a thrill to see just what awesome thing has been made up now...and wonder where it'll go! Also, liking things which tend to be 'futuristic' or contain scenarios which are, will also qualify someone for being a fan of the future, at least partially.

So fellow fans of the future, onward to the blog!

First Post: Blog Mission Statement

2008-10-19T23:14:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Future Is Now: Futuristic Technology Today!

This blog will be a news area to cover all technologies which SEEM like they may be from the future that exist right now, today. (Hence the name) This means items that closely resemble or are based on fictitious or sci-fi sources inlcuding but not limited to, popular books/novels, anime, manga, sci-fi tv/movies/comics, and video games. Also, if something is just totally awesome, look out for it to have a post.

Will you like this blog?
If you enjoy looking at cool videos, reading about strange (yet REAL) sci-fi topics, and seeing pictures of wild new tech, then yes. The parameter on it is that everything that appears must exist at the time of posting and be sort-of available. This means pure concepts like cars-only-on-paper will just not fly. Or that animated "Everything Cellphone" ad that's so popular and features a morphing device that simply doesn't exist. The futureistic item has to be NOW. That's what makes it so thrilling!

Is this some lame company trying to push (insert cellphone here) ?
No! This is an independent blog which is blogged by a fan of the future. (How can one be a fan of the future?) see next post for the answer! It's not going to turn into some company/team churned out drivel about things a goon-squad deems "Popular" or "Money making". If you notice this blog costs nothing to post and nothing to read so just go for it! (AKA: no 'selling out')

What about product reviews?
If somehow, this blog gets some futureistic item that's totally great, then yes, the post of that day will contain a review. I tend to go wild when a new item is aquired, with photos and lots of writing/testing/inspecting.

Press releases/news?
Those too. After all, the news is new! If some company makes some fascinating new device and sends a release or photos or something and it fits the criteria then it'll appear too. Mostly though it'll be discovered from around the web, in magazines, news papers or really anywhere. The blog's purpose is to gather and show YOU all the most fascinating things. Why? 'Cause it's cool.

When will it update?
Whenever something future-cool is learned about. This could be as much as every day.

What sorts of things could appear?
Well, if you like any of the following: Robots, Androids, Cyborgs, Gynoids, Mind-Control, Space Travel, Military, Guns/Weapons, Video Games, VR, Nano-anythings, Genetics, Food, Home-Tech, AI, Human-Enhancement, Vehicles, Essays, and as-yet un-imagined items you'll have a blast here. And, once the posts get old, they can be looked back upon by anyone...in the future! That could really prove amusing, even looking back on the technology "Today 2008" 5 years from now.

Is this going to be a science-nerdfest impenetrable textwall?
No! It's written so it's accessable to anyone. Odd terms will be defined, concepts will be explained and poked at. Tin-foil-hattery will be pestered and bogus things called-out. Yes, it can make fun of stuff too, where appropriate.

Anyway, on to the future!