Nathan

Bending the truth

You know, sometimes I get annoyed with the way things are presented in media; not even news, but everything. Case-in-point that made me write about this was a news story that I saw on my ticker on my desktop: "10-year-old takes college by storm". I actually hadn't heard much about child prodigies lately, so just out of vague interest, I looked into it...and all the magic disappears. He's taking algebra. Yes, it is a 10-year-old taking algebra, but come on. Algebra in college. The kid most likely isn't especially smart out of some cool genetic defect or something that increases knowledge retention...He's probably just a smarter kid who had parents with the crazed motivation to push him through a community college (ELAC), because I know quite a few people who could have learned algebra at 10. There was just no reason to, because the knowledge would come in time.

In the end at that age, the question is not one of learning the raw technical knowledge, but preparing yourself for the world. I would have to say that what would seem to be a much more suitable option would be to tutor him up to completing his secondary school math, rather than using a community college like an ersatz high school, a practice which I suspect is rather wide-spread if you can actually take algebra, of all things, in college. After learning the full high school range of math, then he could go on to some prestigious college for astrophysics, considering he enrolled in his college at 8.

Ultimately, if you're the parents of a more intelligent child with the motivation to push him way ahead, doing what this boy's parents did is probably the least advisable course of action; it all comes back to reiterating that it's not the technical knowledge, but the maturity that's required to join a workforce; and incidentally, considering he wants to be coming out of some school of astrophysics at age 14, what's he going to do for two and a half years while he waits for his driver's license? Somehow, I think that this whole approach of giving him the world's fastest secondary school-level education is a bad idea: He won't be any different from the astrophysics students graduating at 22 or whatever age they may be, except that he'll be younger than they are. Even if he isn't, every university will look down on him as immature and, as he is, a 14 year-old. He isn't necessarily better than everyone else because he finished sooner. Would he take a more normal job more suitable to a teenager, the raw knowledge has nothing to do with how well you can mop the floors. It's how hard you work at mopping the floors, and a good work ethic comes from an intensive and in-depth education...not jumping from 2 years of algebra at a community college to a "prestigious four-year school to study astrophysics".

You can't make lemonade by just filling a glass up with lemons, no matter how many you put in or how quickly; you need to take time to add ice, juice the lemons, add sugar, etc. I just can't help but think that the mindless glorification of things is misleading, especially if when you really look into such things, they're not nearly as good or well-planned as they've been portrayed as being.

Miles and miles away

Recently I had noticed an advertisement from Rolling Rock, a beer company, about something called "moonvertising"; the billboard said to watch the next full moon.

Naturally, I was curious and did some brief research on the concept.
As the image on the left suggests, the company had planned to project their logo onto the moon on the next full moon. An array of powerful lasers would be more than easy to set up to do this: Coca Cola had tried to do this in 1999. Coke's representative later said that it was completely planned out and that their scientists had done out the math and said it would work, but the FAA clamped down on them, issuing a cease-and-desist order, fearing that airplanes running through the laser would be "cut in half."

Rolling Rock knew this too, according to a spokesman. They said they were going to project their logo at first, and I suspect they may have gone along with it if the FAA didn't step in again, but the FAA did stop them; I think that's what they were planning on all along. In order to skirt a false advertising lawsuit, the original intent is would still be there as a fallback, a wise decision on their part if that's what they had been meaning to do. Now, the whole moonvertising thing can live on as another Rolling Rock hoax, of which they already have done several.

Still, all of this is disappointing. It really would be cool if some company invested the time and effort to actually project their logo on the moon. Now, the only way that it could legally be done would be to launch a satellite with the projection module mounted on it, which would probably also quickly be noticed by the FAA or NASA. However, space is a totally free zone; no country could stop anyone with all their equipment in space. To forcibly disable the satellite would constitute an act of war against the owner corporation.

I'd bet that someone is going to try the whole thing again in a few years, though perhaps this time, they might rent out a spot on the next Iridium communications satellite going up.

Holographic data storage

A frequent feature of many science fiction movies is the "data crystal", likely some cheap quartz prop, but the concept behind the crystal medium isn't all that far-fetched.

A subject of recent research in the field of electronic data storage has long been holographic data storage. Current optical disks, for example, are effectively two-dimensional platters that are read by a laser. Newer disks have begun to incorporate a "layered" storage medium that uses different wavelengths to read varying tiers of stacked data, but even those don't compare to the promise of Holographic memory. Holographic memory uses a very complex algorithm that calculates a value based on an arrangement of "platters" stacked on top of each other. The figures they create by moving relative to each other create interference patterns that become your stored data: your pictures are massive jigsaw puzzles of overlapping layers of holographic media.

The reason that this is of note today is because it isn't as unfeasible as some other theories I've blogged about before. Rather, Daewoo Industries has recently created the first functioning model. As with all new technologies, it is not cost-effective yet by any means, but given time,  a theoretical maximum of one trillion bits per cubic centimeter is feasible...that number turns into about 250 gigabytes. An internal data transfer rate of about 250 megabytes per second would be the norm, far faster than my current optical drive read rate on my computer.

IBM also has grand plans with something called Racetrack Memory, which has been variously reported to increase storage capacities 100-fold. Other media formats exist, but most are only hypothetical; since the current leaders in optical disk technology are Blu-Ray stacked disks and primordial Holographic disks, another change in format will be due soon. Floppy diskettes to CDs, to DVDs to HDDVDs, nothing is as far away as people tend to think.

Interestingly enough, In 1989 Western Digital's 40 megabyte hard drive retailed for about $1200. In 2004 they released the Digital Caviar, which had 30,000 times the storage capacity by price (Wikipedia said 36,000, but my calculations told otherwise). The fifteenth root of 30,000 is just under two, so if the 250 gigabyte Western Digital hard drive was $250, the general retail price, and I just saw a 1 terabyte hard drive for $230, then we've actually accelerated since the 1989-2004 period, during which capacities increased by just under a factor of two each year. The newer factor is above two per year, which actually exceeds the prediction by the-scientist-whose-name-I-can't-remember who said that we would be increasing storage capacities twofold per year.