It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here, as I’ve been sacrificing public output in favour of off-line advice to TechInvest and organising the coming year in India and China.
In the meantime, I’ve scanned and uploaded a low-res video of a speech I gave on being a Serial Entrepreneur in Sydney at the June 2000 meeting of the “First Tuesday” group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. I think the relevance has held up. Enjoy.
CT2 points out that in the near future someone with a gazillion cycles of computing power is going to use all the tourist photos on Flickr to synthesize a 3D model of every large photogenic city.
There are more than 2 million photos on Flickr tagged with Rome. They capture almost every nook and cranny, every column and doorway, of the old city. If you had a lot of computer power, and the right smart software, you could take these 2 million views and compile them into a single unified 3D portrait… The movie below does that same thing with huge piles of photos taken off of Flickr.
IBM makes the news with the first image of a complete molecule. It looks a lot like I thought it would…
Using an atomic-force microscope, scientists at IBM Research in Zurich have for the first time made an atomic-scale resolution image of a single molecule, the hydrocarbon pentacene. Atomic-force microscopy works by scanning a surface with a tiny cantilever whose tip comes to a sharp nanoscale point. As it scans, the cantilever bounces up and down, and data from these movements is compiled to generate a picture of that surface.
Solar satellites (a favourite of mine). Japan’s plan – a $21 billion solar-powered generator… to produce one gigawatt of energy, or enough to power 294,000 homes gains a few partners.
Mitsubishi and IHI are joining a research group containing 14 other countries to tackle the daunting task of getting Japan’s four square kilometer solar space station up and running in the next three decades. By 2015, the Japanese government hopes to test a small satellite decked out with solar panels that beams power through space and back to Earth…
Great essay on entropy, energy and confusing coincidental access to a resource endowment with economic, institutional or racial superiority.
The hard reality is that the minority of us who happened to have been born in a few powerful countries squandered half a billion years of stored photosynthesis to give ourselves a brief period of spectacular economic abundance, and by doing so, foreclosed the chance that anybody else would enjoy that same abundance in the future… All the extraordinary things our species has done with fossil fuels over the last three hundred years are functions, in effect, of the difference in chemical potential energy between a barrel of oil and a cloud of smoke… The great majority will make themselves believe in zero point energy and evil space lizards and any other absurdity you care to name, rather than gulp and take a deep breath and admit that the prosperity we’ve enjoyed for the last three centuries was bought at our grandchildren’s expense.
On the other hand, we may get ourselves and our descendants out of jail if the investment of this endowment in education and research allows us to discover a new process to capture energy before we run out of the wherewithal to roll it out. Looks like it will be down to the wire, and come from discoveries in biology rather than chemistry or physics.
Lots of buzz about a potential Apple tablet coming soon. Gizmodo reviews the current digital books.
I’m pretty eagerly awaiting the CrunchPad – a stripped down wireless flat screen running nothing but a web-brower. The system was crowd-source designed by the founder of TechCrunch.
… we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm… case will be aluminum… a Linux based operating system and a Webkit based browser. The device boots directly into the browser…
A programmer writing trojans for the Swiss government has published his code to open source.
Ruben Unteregger has worked for a long time as a software-engineer for the Swiss company ERA IT Solutions. His job there was to code malware that would invade PCs of private users, and allow the wiretapping of VoIP calls — in particular, calls made through Skype. In the German-speaking areas of the country, the Trojans were called ‘Bundestrojaner’ because the Swiss government was involved with their development and use.
Schneier looks at swine flu from a security standpoint.
…it takes about 25 kilobits — 3.2 kbytes — of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes… It’s humbling that I could be killed by 3.2 kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there’s bound to be an exploit or two.
Swine flu continues to spread, with 1799 deaths in 177 countries as at 9 August. The deaths are predominantly in the Americas – 1579 of the total. Clearly the seasonal pattern in the chart below is something new, and in retrospect the timing was fortunate as it didn’t fall into the season where conditions for flu are optimal.
Engineers at the German Fraunhofer Institute have designed a water collector that can extract water from desert air, just like on Dune!
The principle of the process… hygroscopic brine – saline solution which absorbs moisture – runs down a tower-shaped unit and absorbs water from the air. It is then sucked into a tank a few meters off the ground in which a vacuum prevails. Energy from solar collectors heats up the brine, which is diluted by the water it has absorbed. Because of the vacuum, the boiling point of the liquid is lower than it would be under normal atmospheric pressure… The evaporated, non-saline water is condensed and runs down through a completely filled tube in a controlled manner. The gravity of this water column continuously produces the vacuum and so a vacuum pump is not needed. The reconcentrated brine runs down the tower surface again to absorb moisture from the air.
Augmented reality is getting more attention, and the Google phones seem to be the platform of choice. Christchurch’s HITLab has done a lot of work like this.
People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them… Applications like Layar… use a phone’s global positioning technology to determine a person’s location and use the phone’s compass to discern the direction the device is pointed. In this way, the phone can guess what the user is seeing. The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view… Novarama has developed a game called Invizimals that makes it appear as if the world is populated by formerly invisible creatures that can interact with one another. Sony plans to release Invizimals for the PSP handheld device this holiday season…
I saw this one coming late one night a few decades ago… Flourescent green monkeys. Please, just say no to flourescent green people.
Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkeys that can pass their new genetic attributes to their offspring… The researchers modified a lentivirus to carry a jellyfish gene known as GFP (green fluorescent protein) into the genetic material of the marmosets’ cells… that caused the animals to glow green under an ultraviolet light… Most important, eggs from one of the females and sperm from one of the males had the gene, and the researchers reported that the male’s sperm was used to produce at least one second-generation offspring with the gene — a male named Kouichi whose skin glowed green under the light… because the work marks the first time members of a species so closely related to humans have had their genetic makeup permanently altered, the research set off alarms that it marked a troubling step toward applying such techniques to people… In humans, researchers have tried to correct genetic defects in individual patients, but there has always been a strict prohibition against making changes that would be passed on…
Gartner is lowering its IT industry forecast.
Hit by the economic downturn and fluctuating exchange rates, worldwide IT spending is expected to drop 6 percent this year, according to a new Gartner report… Spending will likely settle in at $3.2 trillion for 2009, compared with $3.4 trillion in 2008. Last year, IT spending had actually surged by 6.2 percent over 2007… Due to the ongoing recession, the projected 6 percent spending decline is greater than Gartner’s original forecast of a 3.8 percent drop, which the firm made in March… Hardware spending will see the sharpest drop at 16.3 percent, while software spending will ease down only 1.6 percent…
Often, soon-to-be-outmoded technologies experience a final wave of innovation as radical improvements that were always seen to cannibalise existing product are given a chance. This is happening right now in lightbulbs, where incandescents are fated to give way to LED, OLED and other solid state light emmitters. The NYT carries an industry press release as “news”.
There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades…
