Nathan

AI: Xerox my brain any day.

Although I have heard faint stirrings along these lines, very few people have actually said much about artificial intelligence lately. I imagine that it has been swept away in many of the recent events, but I still find it interesting.

The concept may have come from a science fiction novel, but in my opinion, it might be best to try to literally copy the inner workings of the human brain into a mechanical form if we ever did make an attempt at true AI. While many facets of the brain may be redundant and useless, a machine with the brain's abilities and a nearly unlimited amount of computer processing power at it's disposal could, eventually, become a superhuman--human intelligence with the ability to think, converse, and calculate on a massive scale.

Now, I doubt that we would ever have a Hollywood-style machine takeover of the world. Most of the subjects of brain copying would likely be selected for morality and understanding of human politics, emotions, etc., and therefore would also probably be educated beforehand on their responsibilities as a  supercomputer, provided they retained their memory.

Imagine the possiblites of a machine (or person) like that. Many services that require occasional conversation, but are mostly "relevance" jobs, could be prime targets for the computer. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a program in which humans do basic labor that machines can't do, like sorting images into groups with pizza parlors and without them. It may be easy, boring, repetitive work, but it's something that even the most comprehensive electronic recognition systems would have trouble with.

Flight Simulator

With new technology and graphics, flight simulators become ever more immersive and realistic. Now, anyone can train to be a pilot, perhaps even with real controls if you're willing to shell out that kind of money.

In this example, we see the difference between real life flight and simulated flight. Admittedly, the fake one does look a little off at some points, but you must agree, the fake one looks much nicer.

Just another advent of the first generation of the new millenium--some people can fly better than real pilots. Plus, if you can't, the planes aren't real, so go ahead and do barrel rolls with a 747.

Two more examples: Flying a waterplane over scotland, and South American landings.

The next generation of computer technology

Despite the already unnecessarily large hard drives and fast internet connections, ever-better things constantly are coming out in the world of computer technology, making that nice new hard disk and media card you bought yesterday outdated in a month. However, some scientists are contemplating one tremendous leap ahead.

Recently, scientists have been able to manipulate silicon into producing infrared lasers. Replacing the copper wires connecting computer chips could not only form the first instances of circuit boards shaped as cubes, but the transmission speed of bytes in the circuits would be increased to, on average, 10 gigabytes per second; 10,000 times faster than the current average transfer speed of microchips, which is about 1 megabyte per second.  By using this technology to replace the current inefficient modem transfer boxes, you could increase you internet speed a thousandfold or more.

Of course, even these statistics are dwarfed, considering that one fiber optic cable is capable of handling amounts of data in excess of 1 terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) per second. These wires could transfer all the physical written material in the world ever created in minutes.

Now, to handle that kind of download speed, you would need a much bigger hard drive. Researchers at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania have discovered a new way to write tremendous amounts of data on to incredibly small hard drives. By utilizing ferroelectric, these students have designed a hard drive capable of packing 12.8 petabytes, or 12,800,000 gigabytes, into one cubic centimeter of space. By comparison, the entire library of congress only holds around 10 petabytes of total printed and electronic information. The only thing hindering the creation of these hard drives is how to construct the nanowires that would be needed to network the bowels of the drives. Construction would need to be done on an extremely small scale.

Just to be mean, though, a single gram of DNA can store around 2.25 zettabytes of data. In layman's terms, that would be 2,250,000 petabytes, 2,250,000,000,000 gigabytes, or 2,250,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data. What you would store on the DNA, let alone on the 12.8 petabyte hard drive, I have no idea.

Right now you may say that these kinds of things are ludicrous; nothing takes up enough space to make these things viable. However, the arise of this technology will form the basis of superprograms and Star-trek style virtual reality. Why settle for your petty programs when you can catalogue every single object in the known universe, down to the last little asteroid, on a small drive that weighs less than two pounds? Why settle for straightforward, blind programs when every program can be given a mind of its own, a mind perhaps even more complex than the human brain? Artificial intelligence will no longer be a distant prospect , nor will complete, immersive virtual reality recreation and training be so improbable.

Link list:
What's a petabyte?
What's a zettabyte?
What is the largest increment of data?
Where is the 12.8 petabyte hard drive article?
Where is the 10 gigabyte per second internet article? (Origionally taken from the 2007 Scientific American article "lasing silicon", which is not currently availible on the internet.)
What is the meaning of life?

The Great Firewall of China

China, being a Communist regime, naturally cannot help but censor its citizens in their trolling around the internet. When a Chinese web surfer searches for, say, Taiwan in Google, they will receive no search results unless their computer has the appropriate clearance.

Sebastian Wolfgarten has devised three ways to circumvent these, working off a rented Chinese server. He discovered that the Chinese mainframe servers send a kill code to the internet connection provider whenever a person types in keywords that include, for example, Amnesty.org or Falun Gong or Tiananmen square. Three easy ways to bypass this are to use the anonymous internet provider Tor, where the codes sent by the Chinese mainframes cannot find you, programming your personal firewall to block the kill commands, or, if you have a knowledge of hacking and plenty of time, doing something called "tunneling", where you hide the search requests in innocent looking email-based automated data and packet requests. Another computer outside of China, perhaps a Google server in the US, returns your request through the same process, allowing the data to pass freely, if taking a small bit longer to be processed.

Popsci comments on the vulnerability of China's censorship here...

We know where your router lives

For those people who want to help the hacker community without being liable as a criminal yourself, and you'd be surprised how many people actually want to, wardriving is probably your best bet. Wardriving is a legal, but just barely so technique for gathering a compilation of wireless routers through brute force. What most people do is take a vehicles, and Wi-Fi enabled laptop, a copy of  Netstumbler or Kismet, and a booster dish to enhance their network detection.

Most people who wardrive pool their findings on the website called Wigle.net, which catalogs the locations and specifications of all the wireless networks detected in the world. You may add your own, though it may be safer not too. Instead, many people add their wardriving files. Hackers can put these things to use by using it to find wireless networks in direct proximity to them or the computers that they may be hacking.

View the Wigle.net map of wireless networks in America and see if you can find your own if you're that unlucky.

Best of whats new 2006: The $100 laptop

The nonprofit organization OLPC, or One Laptop Per Child, a brainchild of MIT, works toward a noble cause. They created a laptop that is extraordinarily efficient, (the inner workings of which are a trade secret), that is able to operate easily on one tenth of the power of a normal, high-end laptop. Most of the power savings, however, can be attributed to the screen design. In laptops, the biggest power user is the screen, so MIT invented a completely new LCD for their laptop.

Each pixel is made to both reflect light and color-filter generated light. Turn on the LED behind the screen, and a full-color image will appear as light passes through the tinted filters. Turn it off, and it uses sunlight, (not to be confused with solar power, this is different), to create a black and white image ideal for basic uses such as word processing. This way, whether or not you turn the LED on, you are still saving about 90% of the power, maybe a little less with the LED on.  Many poor communities could use a hand crank to power their laptops, something previously unheard of. MIT opes to see this new power saving technology, perhaps only with the LED part in America, soon. A common laptop battery could operate for up to 20 hours.

Several poor countries will pilot this, and almost a dozen are in the queue after that. After that, most countries, save the richest ones or the most insane ones, are currently attributing government funding to consider the laptops. Save 9 countries, every country is at least petitioning for the program. Even so, no matter where you are, except perhaps North Korea, you will easily be able to buy a laptop soon.

See the article

See the website

My favorite picks from the Megagoods 2.0 2006 review

Here is a sampling of a few of the most fascinating goodies from the November Megagoods 2.0 review from Popsci.com:

 
Literally throwing the tent: The new 2-Second Air from Quechua of France is the solution to all camping crises; most people have observed, or worse, experienced the annoyances of trying to assemble some tents. This tent assembles in the 2 seconds that it flies. You throw it into the air, not unlike a big Frisbee, and like magic, it is ready for you to climb into and hide from the bears before it even hits the ground.

 
http://decathlontent.com/, 69US$ from Quechua.

 
The Hippie flash drive: Not only does this odd flash drive come in sizes up to 1 Gigabyte of memory, it also comes in what will become your favorite chunk of wood. These peppy little sapling chunks are precision milled to contain a powerful flash drive. Watch your coworkers faces when you plug a section of an oak branch into their USB port.

 
oooms.nl 57-90US$

 
This one doesn’t shatter: When you really have a need for a rugged laptop, perhaps if your going to go be a journalist in some Middle-Eastern country, you need the General Dynamics GoBook XR-1, the incredibly durable notepad. The little thing can survive a terminal velocity impact, and it completely water, sand, and idiot proof.

 
gd-computing.com $4,330

Go to Popsci.com and look at the Megagoods 2.0 review

 

"I don't think that we're in Kansas anymore."

Nowadays, with the advent of Flash 4 and some more recent editions of Java as computer languages, games are becoming increasingly interactive. Many of these games are surprisingly small, to the extent that the fit into the servers on the Internet, which weren't made to carry an astronomical amount of data.

Some games that I have played extend interaction to the point where you can "paint" your own path using your mouse. Many of these games are side-scrolling, though, to make it simpler and smaller.Others have nearly perfect physics, offering exciting possibilities of hidden secrets hidden way up in the sky, deep underground, or wherever you can somehow explore.

An increasing amount of people are playing these games every day, and are often surprised to hear that these games are only the size of 30 pages in Microsoft Word. As computers get more efficient, they will be able to hold more data, run programs faster, and better condense, or zip, data.

A single fiber-optic fiber is able to transmit over a terabite of data every second, and a single fiber-optic cable has 32 fibers. That one cable could transmit all the written material in the world in less than a minute. The only things inhibiting Bill Gates from instantaneously downloading every song in existence on the Internet are the converters, which interpret the signals from the fiber-optic cables. They are comparably extraordinarily inefficient, and until the time comes when we discover how to store things using fiber-optics, eliminating the need for a converter and gigantically increasing memory spaces.

The unused alt key

I recently found out one of the primary, yet little known uses of the alt key. By holding down the alt key, and typing a number anywhere from 1 to 4 digits using the keypad, and then releasing the alt key, you can create all kinds of wonderful, illustrious symbols.

These symbols can also come in handy. My mother underwrites, and she holds down the alt key, presses 2 then 4, and releases it to make an upwards arrow, which I will show in a update to this post soon.

For a complete list of the symbols, follow the leader through this hyperlink, and ignore the stuff at the top of the page.

Hopefully virus-free...

I recently found a very interesting game, a child of the Falling Sand series. This game is known as New Sand Game, and is very entertaining.

The Falling Sand series is made using very little memory, being almost only a simple Flash game. The game usually has correct physics, and is in some forms very expansive. The New Sand Game game allows you to create virtual environments with the four basic building blocks of the Falling Sand series, water, sand, oil, and salt, and some other help, such as ground, wax, plant, seed, fire, ???, and spout. These all do different things, and are all applied to your blank sheet in a way not unlike the paint program.

These all interact: fire burns oil quickly and wax slowly, ground and wax contain things, salt dissolves and forms stalagmites in water, sand sinks in water to form a bed, plant grows in water, seeds grow on land, spout makes water, fire make water disappear, ??? makes everything except plant disappear, and so on. 

This game allows me to create entire virtual environments, with trees, streams, waterfalls, ponds, caves, and even forest fires. Beyond that, you can also just tool around with the game: If you fill up a circle of ground with oil, overlay wax coming out of the ground and back into the oil, and light it up, you've got a bomb with a little fuse.

If I've managed to make you curious at all, than you should play the game at :

http://fallingsandgame.com/sand/NewSand.html

Enjoy!