Mad Engineering

Artificial Plants II

2012-01-21T06:30:00.000-06:00

Some time ago, I wrote about the idea of using artificial plants, machines that would strip the carbon from carbon dioxide in closd areas. What if I took this idea one step further, and have complete photosynthesis? The artificial plant would use energy to use carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen. It would then dispense the glucose into a small container for later collection. The energy would not need to be solar, as is for natural plants. Being a machine and not an organism, it would not suffer disease, die when the water supply runs out, or rot. It would just be, sustaining animal life whenever it could. This and a large amount of energy could sustain civilizations to flourish in places where it is currently impossible, like the depths of the ocean, underground, or in space. However, it would also need to add nitrogen from the air to the glucose to make basic proteins, because animals can't live on sugar alone.

Part Names

2012-01-11T09:52:00.000-06:00

While shopping a week ago, I finally learned the names of the parts that I use on computers daily: * The screws that hold the outer case of the computer together are #6 - 32. They have a length of 5mm, and threading that rises 1mm per rotation. The outer diameter is defined as 0.1380 inches, which is a little more than 3.5 mm. * The screws that hold the internal components, such as attaching the hard drives to the frame, are M3. They have a length of 5mm, and threading that rises 1/2mm per rotation. * The screws that attach the motherboard to the outer case are, surprisingly, also #6-32, but with an extended head that has an M3 drilled into them. This allows an attaching layer to be attached to the case, then the motherboard to be attached to that layer, so the motherboard can later be removed for replacement. This is also necessary because there are conductive pins on the bottom of the motherboard, and if the motherboard were to physically touch the case, a short circuit may occur. This standardization helps to keep the price of computers down.

Yarn Computer

2011-12-31T10:30:00.000-06:00

The computers that I use on a daily basis are made of, effectively, sand and copper. Every computer, every electronic thing I have ever used, or touched, has followed this pattern. The one non-traditional computer I have seen to date was a pure electronic relay computer, which used electrical switches with no silicon. The reason this pattern is not used is that it's inefficient, impossibly loud, slow, and expensive. And then there's today's strange technology: Via Slashdot, an international team of scientists have made circuits out of, surprisingly, yarn wires. The yarn is threaded with electrical conducting materials, such as copper, and woven into various electrical switches. Additional yarn can be added to weave the item into a piece of clothing, thereby achieving the long time goal of wearable computers, in this case, computers that are literally clothing. There are some minor downsides to the current state of technology. No, it won't shock or electrocute you, but it's currently at the inefficient, impractical, slow, and expensive state that the relay computer that I linked at the begining of this article. Much R&D is required before you'll be able to, say, use a sweater as a GPS unit, a sock to monitor your vital signs, or anything of the other wondrous potential of these technologies. Technology sometimes has to crawl before it can walk, and walk before it can run.

Christmas Truce

2011-12-25T09:00:00.000-06:00

On this day, 97 years ago, the horrors and violence of the first world war suddenly came to an abrupt end. Soldiers on opposing sides met in the middle, exchanged gifts, sang traditional songs, and for a minute, human nature was shown to be remarkably civilized. An impromptu soccer game was even held. The generals, of course, hated it. Pal-ing around with the enemy did not get them the concessions that they wanted, way better for peace than for war. The more nationalistic, the more they hated it -- Christmas songs weren't bringing in any of the land or glory. Of course, the next day, everyone was back to shooting at each other, since after all, a war was on. The generals worked hard to avoid a repeat in the next four years of the war, until the Central powers finally surrendered. Events like this, the Christmas Truce, make me feel that a better world is definitely possible.

Neurotransmitter Drugs

2011-12-10T08:30:00.000-06:00

Caffeine is a commonly used substance in my workplace. It is a stimulant drug that works in humans by interfering with the neurotransmitter adenosine, as illustrated by The Oatmeal Plants that make caffeine do so to retaliate against the insects that eat them. The bugs get overstimulated and panic themselves to death. there are many other mechanisms that could be interfered with. For example, seratonin. Blocking seratonin would interfere with the pleasure of hobbies and activities, but also addiction. Under the influence of seratonin blocking drugs, a person would not be motivated to seek out their addictions. Maybe instead they'd have a nap. Four months later, the drugs are discontinued, and the patient is encouraged to take up a hobby, which is now fun. Other mechanisms could cure anxiety disorders, weight control issues, impulsivity, and a host of other quality-of-life problems.

Netcycle

2011-12-05T09:01:00.001-06:00

In Vietnam, rising wealth has lead to a major increase in motor vehicles as a means of transportation, and with the rise of motor vehicles has come a rash of street racers. The police dislike it, as the races run faster than many of the riders can control, often causing property damage and personal injury. The police's first motivation is to stop vehicles who participate in this type of activity, ASAP. In my country, the United States, a fast vehicle that refuses to pull over for the police is herded onto a road with no traffic, and a strip of spikes is laid on the road. As the vehicle approaches, the spikes are activated. The spikes puncture the tire in such a way that the vehicle comes to a halt. The spikes are then quickly retracted so that the chasing police car can run past it without this tire damage. The vehicle's driver is then forced to yield. Vietnam isn't wealthy enough to buy such machinery, nor industrialized enough to make it themselves, so they dipped into their historical engineering and decided to stop the bikes with fishing nets. Apparently, due to Vietnam's long history of fishing, the average Vietnamese person can throw a net very very precisely. This net, thrown into the motorcycle's motor, jams it in such a way that the motorcycle rolls to a controlled halt. Other methods had previously been rejected because the motorcycle lost control, which often resulted in the very crashes that the police were trying to avoid. It's cheap, simple, and effective.

Reincarnation Theory

2011-11-28T07:30:00.001-06:00

The most common theme in all of the world's religions is that death is not the end of existence. This is not universal, and a few religions actually do teach that death is the end. Many religions describe a second world for the departed. Another common idea is that the dead are reborn as new people, an idea called reincarnation. Various religions describe various reasons why this should happen, and how it would work, usually positing that you have a soul that is moved from body to body. The Dalai Lama was famously asked by Carl Sagan if he would cease to believe in reincarnation, which is a major component of his religion. He answered that yes, proof was proof and believing untrue things was like lying to yourself. He added that it would prove very difficult to disprove reincarnation. I bring this up because about a week ago I was reading an article about a psychologist in the 1960s who hypnotized a large number of people in California and asked them if they could remember of past life. To her great surprise, many reported that they could, describing the food, clothing, and customers of a 30 to 70 year life. She then compared the reports to actual historical records, finding them to be accurate about 85% of the time. The new page community, whose religion teaches reincarnation, immediately jumped on this study as proof of reincarnation. The most commonly reported past life was World War II era Chinese, suggesting a period of less than 10 years between lives. Assuming that all of this true, it makes sense to my understanding of history. America and China were allies in the war, and to a Chinese person of this time, their ally, "Meiguo," as they called America, was far from their enemies, rich beyond all their wildest dreams, and powerful. If dead people reincarnated and had a choice as to where they would be reborn, America would be a tempting choice for a dead Chinese person. China would have been their first choice, but they would probably be afraid to return to where their enemies still had a major presence. Again if true, I would expect the former Chinese to be absolutely contemptuous of their old enemy, the Japanese, terrified of overhead airplanes (which in their past life would have been Japanese and actively attempting to kill them), and affectionate to their former home, China. Reincarnation religions don't have many teaching about how cultural traits carry over between lives, other than that memories are outright erased, but Chinese culture teaches an importance to family, and stresses scholarship as a means to get ahead in the world. These habits might remain. Of course, there was an immediate criticism of the study, which found a massive methodology hole large enough to drive a truck through. It is well established that we subconsciously remember way more of what we read than we consciously remember, up to all of it, and that hypnotized people are ridiculously suggestible. A person who had read a history book that year would have access to very detailed accounts of all the aspects given in the report. Also, subjects often described dates in their supposed past lives as "Such-and-such BC," a nomenclature not used until some 400-500 years after the fact. During the BC/AD switch-over, the most common calendar was the AUC, or "After the founding of the city." The city being Rome, the most famous city at the time. It is pretty clear that in their altered state, the subjects made stuff up, and the stuff they made up was accurate because the subject had studied history. It was a tempting idea because the only people with knowledge of what people experience in death are dead themselves, and they are in no condition to report back to the living. It is even possible that the dead have no existence at all, and that deeply frightens people.

Markov Chain

2011-11-26T08:00:00.002-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

It may be surprising, but at the core of thousands of chatbots like Megabot and Cleverbot is a simple mathematical construction implemented in about 30 - 50 lines of code called a Markov Chain. This construction was developed over a hundred years ago by a Russian mathematician, Andrey Markov. Dr. Markov posited a finite state machine, in which one input lead to a series of outputs, and one was chosen by probability. The chain would not remember previous actions in the chain, but just note that this node is most likely associated with that one, and hop to that node to repeat the process. If it searches four nodes deep for probability, it can, given a graph of commonly used words from an existing corpus of text, write text almost indistinguishable from the kind that would be written by the original human author. Markov chains could also be used for math equations, chess games (associating moves), or even programming code (this line of code is probably followed by this one, so write that line in next). Given a broad list of sentences commonly said by human chat-attenders, a Markov chain can actually pass a Turing test. Key word being "can", not "will." On the downside of this, due to the stateless nature of the chain, the bot lacks any understanding of either the stimulus or the response. It lacks an understanding of grammar, and often posits totally nonsensical, or even ungrammatical, sentences. Fed enough scientific papers, it might write a sentence like "It is established that." This phrase might appear in the original work, but the bot fails to recognize that this is not an entire sentence. I might use a Markov chain to help with creativity. It would randomly combine ideas, which could lead to some creative conclusions. As an example, Usenet's Mark V. Shaney was actually a Markov Chain bot. People thought it was a very confused man, possibly on drugs, and possibly insane, but it was a computer program. The most famous utterance that this bot produced was "I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt." The bot had started with a common opening statement for posts on the particular discussion group, "I spent an interesting evening recently," which they used to describe dating experiences, with part of the expression to "Take it with a grain of salt," meaning that the previous statement should be viewed via non-literal means, and with little claims to any veracity or truth. The two collide to produce the hilarious impression of a man obsessively staring at a tiny speck of salt, so infinitesimal, and yet so orderly, in some sort of weird quasi-science ritual. And that's the wonderful thing about Markov Chains -- you'll mostly get nonsensical crap, but hilarious things will pop up all the time.

Plasma Water Cleaning

2011-11-17T08:30:00.000-06:00

Clean water is a major need in much of the world. While water is a very common commodity on Earth, drinkable water is much less so. Much of our water is unthinkably salty, polluted, or so swarming with disease-causing bacteria and viruses that drinking it will probably result in your death. In many parts of the world, half of one's day is spent obtaining clean water so that your family doesn't die. And even then, some very clear, very clean water can be infected, and you'd never know until everyone who drank it becomes unbearably sick. In Berkeley, scientists have developed a way to not only sterilize water, but make it actively kill bacteria and viruses for up to a week after treatment, allowing people to stockpile water. They do this all with low temperature plasma, the type that develops in a neon light sign, or those lightning-ball toys. It's cheaper so far than the traditional treatments for water, such as bleach, filtering, or UV light. This kills even drug-resistant bacteria, which could save thousands of lives. Plus, it's cheap. A metal rod and a few cents of electricity will clean a few gallons of water. Even if the average resident can't afford this, there are many charities that would very cheerfully provide it. The saved time will also improve lives, as Dr. Hans Rosling pointed out how the washing machine turned his native Sweden into a first world country. Why? With the time that his mother saved by not having to manually scrub the family's clothing, she was able to educate her children, work to increase her income, and generally make life better all around. Automation has clearly made everyone's lives better. With clean water, child mortality will go down, hygine will improve, there will be more time for education and productive work.

It begins

2011-11-11T09:21:00.000-06:00

So Apple now has a personal assistant with AI characteristics. People have been messing with it, and sometimes, it goes very very wrong:

UFOs

2011-11-10T06:04:00.000-06:00

You know where I think the ideas of UFOs came from? I think there was an experimental aircraft crash in 1947, the government got all weird and evasive about it, like they do for anything classified, rightly or wrongly, some guy happened to write a book about people being abducted by aliens that year, and the two ideas got combined in a massive hurricane of terrified and crazy. Tune in tomorrow when I continue with the downright strange things of this world.

Economic Creativity

2011-11-07T06:32:00.000-06:00

The Korean, a Korean American man with some very fascinating takes on both his respective cultures and their interactions, has a fascinating article on why Korea will never produce a company quite like Apple. For cultural reasons. Wait, what? The first surprising one is the superpower status of the home country. We Americans tend to think of our status as a superpower mostly in hard-power terms: Extensive military might, so many trillion dollars that we could outright buy at least 3 quarters of the countries out there, and the like, but the soft power is what's driving things here. People in incredibly diverse nations still love American ideas, culture, clothing, and inventions. That iPods and MacBooks are American designed is an active selling point in all but the most virilantly anti-American areas of the world. The Korean points out that if the iPod were, say, Italian, it'd have difficulty selling outside of Italy. The modern internet's love of bands like Caramell (Swedish), O-Zone (Romanian), and singers like Eduard Khil (Russian) is actually an aberation historically, as most people prefer music in a language that they already speak, in a style appropriate to their own culture. Another culture's music typically sounds vaugely preposterous, unless that culture is a superpower that you feel you need exposure to for success. If the iPod was Korean....it'd probably be doomed unless well stocked with American music. The Korean then went on to report that there used to be a site very much like Facebook many years before Facebook. It was perfect for Korea...proper language support, a style that suited Korean culture, and so on. One out of every four Koreans used it, a prospect that gets most businesses drooling. It then failed to expand past the borders of Korea when, surprise, things assumed to be true in Korea turn out to be totally false in other countries. The glam and glitter that appealed to Koreans looked like a cornball thing for a five year old girl in other countries. The extensive use of high density images that gave it its luster in Korea made it load slower than flowing glass in countries that didn't have as good a high speed network, which is pretty much all of them. And so today, those Koreans use Facebook. The network effect took off to the point where the older site just doesn't have your friends on it and facebook does. And today I've seen people use facebook to have friends across five oceans. This isn't to say that being creative is not a cultural trait the Koreans have. My Korean-built cell phone is plenty creative. Korean ships can be found in every port. The creativity is clearly still there, but the domain and expression tends to be very different. Since Korea's independence in 1945, it went from the poorest country on earth (basically totally wrecked in World War II) to today in the top 7 wealthiest nations. Nations are probably best off figuring out their strengths, and playing to them. If I wasn't so tired, I could probably draw a profound conclusion from this.

Abstraction

2011-11-06T06:46:00.000-06:00

Even relatively simple on your computer actually involve some rather complex chains of events. Take the keystrokes that I made to type this post up. Every time I hit a key, a little action something like this occurs: KEYBOARD: CPU, stop everything! The boss just pushed a key! CPU: Okay, I've stopped the task. What letter did he push? KEYBOARD: "e", sir. CPU: Alright, and I can enter that into the proper buffer so it can interact with the program. Now, back to work. The letters in the buffer then move into the text editing field, which gets uploaded to the server to make that post. And every time I pressed a key, literally hundreds of times per minute, the CPU had to quick, stop everything lest my keystroke be lost. Likewise, even turning the computer on involves a complex chain of actions, which is why your computer takes 2 to 5 minutes to even load up your desktop so that you can start working. A professor of computer science, Jean-Baptiste Queru, points out the deep abstractions involved when you so much as visit a website. All of this complexity is deeply hidden from you. You just clicked a link and this whole chain of events happened so that you could read something. Truly, we are better off today than even the richest and most powerful people a mere 300 years ago.

Oh noes

2011-11-05T07:53:00.000-05:00

My readers, I have failed you. I grew busy at work, solving problems, and killing many many bad things. I have neglected to write in this blog for over a month. If you stopped reading, I don't blame you. I will be queueing up some good things to read which should post during the week.

Load Bearing Backpack Machine

2011-08-29T06:07:00.002-05:00

In the poorer nations of the world, hundreds of millions of people earn their living moving things. Moving luggage. Moving cargo. Moving the harvest to the market. Moving water. Moving bricks to the construction yard You name it, they'll haul it. It makes them enough to get by. In rich nations like mine, vehicles usually perform this function.
An Indian inventor has come up with a machine that attaches to the porter's body and allows him or her to more comfortable haul of the load like a backpack. Postures improve, and the load the porter can carry increases, which in theory could mean higher profits. The invention also removes much of the medical risks of portering, which will hopefully mean far fewer ruined lives.
The best thing is that this invention is exceptionally cheap. It can be made for a few cents of bamboo...or plastic. It can also readily be reconfigured to a luggage carrier for the airport crowd, or an over-the-head carrier for small but fragile cargo like eggs. (which it will keep perfectly balanced so there's no chance of an expensive spill)

ParanoidFS

2011-08-28T09:17:00.000-05:00

There is only one thing that I expect from a filesystem -- I expect it to store my files. If a hard drive is like a storage warehouse, a filesystem is like installing filing cabinets in that warehouse. While it is possible to just keep papers in a large pile on the floor, this is not recommended.
When it's totally unacceptable to lose data, the current orthodox solution is to use RAID-1, a system in which all data is copied to two hard drives. If one drive fails, it can be replaced and the data copied from the other drive. My new idea is an imprcatical way of achieving this on only one hard drive. (Because your company has a bizarre policy of not ordering new hardware and a crippling hard drive shortage.)
ParanoidFS would store data in five clusters for each item. At read time, the five clusters would be read and compared. A Quorum of three would decide if any blocks were defective. (That is, the blocks "vote" what the correct value is, and if one or two of them have a different value than the others, then they are wrong and are marked as defective.) This could even be done in the background after loading a fifth of the file from each cluster for performance. The filesystem would allow itself to only work in a read-only mode after a certain number of blocks were declared bad, and a warning message would tell you to buy a new hard drive. One you can take to the accounting department.
On the downside, you would get at best 1/5th of the capacity of the hard drive. A typical 1TB drive on the market, for instance, would only provide 200GB of paranoidFS, but it would be a totally immortal 200GB.

The Ugandan Space Program

2011-08-27T07:05:00.000-05:00

Slashdot informs me today that a small group of Ugandans have an impressive dream: They intend to create their own space program with no help from the Ugandan government, and using only the local resources.
This is a big deal because Uganda is not the wealthiest country on earth, and so far space exploration has been the domain of large nations doing this for billion dollar science grants and military-industrial-complex testing of rocketry and other technology. Uganda has pretty much none of those things. At the moment, the team are designing airplanes, but they intend to move upwards as they gain more capability. (None of the team are professional engineers.)
Ideally, discoveries that this team makes will make space travel an order of magnitude less expensive, and thus more available to more people.

Hypertime and the Electric Plants

2011-08-16T06:11:00.000-05:00

In a lot of media, there's places where time flows at a different rate than normal. The amount of time in and the amount of time out don't match. The closest real equivalent to this is special relativity time dilation, and that usually works in the opposite way. (The person accelerating experiences less time than everyone else.)
Anyway, this got me thinking about the movie "Clockstoppers" and their central mcGuffin, the "Hypertime". In the movie, the protagonist's scientist father invented a device that shifted him into a paralell time axis, ("Hypertime"), in which one could do time-like things and yet no time would have passed. After a long sequence of teenage boy antics and showing off for a girlfriend, the device is stolen by the movie's villain to set the center stage for the plot. And this gave me ideas.
I'd sleep in hypertime. I'd arrange for a hypertime room at work, and breaks there. When some problem has be absolutely screaming in irritation, I'd punch out, go to the hypertime room, take an eight hour nap under sedation, goof off for another four, and then return to work as no objective time had actually passed. I'd write this blog in hypertime and have two or three posts a day. Except, nags the nerdy part of me, some of this is just plain implausible.
No time means no outside electricity and no airflow. I'd suffocate while asleep. While there are existing solutions to this, such as chemical rebreathers (they have caustic solutions that absorb the carbon from your breath), my mind was already at work for alternatives, which could be useful in the real world.
The electric plant would, given electricity, strip carbon off of carbon dioxide, thus keeping air breathable in sealed environments. And provide a large source of carbon powder, which can later be sold as fuel, recovering some of the cost of the electricity. Extra bonus in solar-heavy rural areas like eastern California and Arizona, where you could have entire ranches of solar panels plus electric plants, sucking the carbon out of the air and gathering it for sale. Both to the coal plant to burn as fuel and to the pencil factory to stuff into pencils.
Portable power systems are a little more practical. Car battery, basically, that would be charged in a time environment.

Engineering Apotheosis

2011-08-14T07:27:00.000-05:00

Image by Ralph Buckley via Flickr

There are three inventions that might not even be possible, but given them in conjunction, would grant engineers absolute omnipotence. Given all three of these things, it's only a matter of time before I'm creating entire universes.
First, a zero point energy generator. This might not even be possible. Energy is like the money of physics, and there have been a few clues that it might be possible to have negative energy as well as the positive kind that we're familiar with. If so, then from a "zero point" of no energy, you could draw off and separate arbitrary amounts of negative and positive energy, which would have to be shuttled off in opposite directions, as they would nullify each other on contact. However, negative energy hasn't been shown to really exist, and might make about as much sense as making money by sending out checks for negative amounts of money and somehow collecting when the checks are cashed in.
The first thing I'd do with zero point energy would be the mundane energy use, running the air conditioning, refrigerator, and lights with the energy, and do experiments with the negative energy. Could I run my computer on anti-electricity, and if so, would it absorb heat instead of producing it?
The next thing would be a matter condenser, that would change energy into hydrogen. Since E=MC^2, this would ensure an unlimited supply of materials. Of course, this would not be worthwhile without the unlimited energy from the zero point system.
The third thing would be some sort of teleportation system to make arbitrary manufacturing. It would have to teleport together raw materials to make things, such as combining a few grams of carbon from charcoal, hydrogen and oxygen from water, and nitrogen from air to form a hot dog. It would also need to be able to scan new patterns and store them in a computer. This also might not be possible due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in which knowing the exact position of an atom requires unpredictably altering its velocity and vice versa.
My power with these things would grow exponentially. First I'd use the teleporter/replicator to scan the three inventions and be able to arbitrarily produce more. Then I'd start scanning useful tools, which I now have in arbitrary amounts. Then, having proven its safety, I'll start handing them out because other people deserve this too. And next, I'd start designing entire star systems, which I teleport into existence. If I want to visit them, a matter-condenser rocket will take me there, accelerating to preposterous speeds with a zero-point-energy plus matter condenser, producing a stream of supercompressed hydrogen gas.
I'd send probes to go deep into the void, make a ring of trillions of matter condensers that was several AU in diameter, and spray hydrogen into the center to create stars. When the star grows enough, the welding on the ring fails and the matter condensers go flying outward into the universe. I'd recharge the sun by swapping out large amounts of it for a fresh cube of hydrogen. The heat death of the universe would never occur, because we would continuously rebuild it from scratch.

The Accidental Spammer

2011-08-13T08:23:00.000-05:00

One of the strangest facts about fighting spam is that most spam comes from people who aren't even aware that they are doing it.
There are eight types of problems I deal with at work, and the top two are people spamming without even being aware that they are. See, the spammer lost access to audiences with his own accounts long ago. Either his ISP doesn't tolerate it and booted him, or does tolerate it and was blacklisted, so all his emails fall into the ether before reaching his customers. So instead, he infects people with a virus that gives him the passwords to their accounts, and spams in their name. When this doesn't work, the spammer resorts to guessing passwords, just in case someone decides to use "password," "123456" or their username as a password, because a shockingly high number of people do.
Alternatively, botnets can hack a number of popular installations with remote file injection, and the spammers love to insert mailer scripts into these. mailer scripts that send out hundreds of thousands of emails before being noticed.
The best protection against the first kind is to regularly scan your computer for viruses, using any one of the anti-virus products in the market, most of which you can at least try for free. Use a strong password, such as the first letter in the lines of your favorite poem or song in random capitalization, with a number or punctuation mark, and at least 12 letters long.
To prevent the second one, make sure your content software is up to date. Many packages even allow auto-upgrading, informing you if they are out of date and providing a handy upgrading button so that you can order it if you wish.

Artificial Immune System

2011-08-12T06:42:00.007-05:00

Many simple lifeforms see our body as a plentiful sack of resources -- bacteria desire our proteins, carbohydrates, and iron and viruses seek to turn our cells into viral factories. Since these thefts hurt us and can even kill us, we have developed immune systems that destroy these on "sight," along with malfunctioning cells a la cancer.
While our immune system is strong, we benefit from helping it out, especiallyin medical situations where all tools must be absolutely sterile. Our existing plans for this involve high pressure steam, which heats the tool to temperatures that denature the bacteria and virus's proteins so that they cannot survive. We also have chemical attacks such as alcohols that have the same effect. This is also required to a lesser degree in other fields like restaurants, in which it would be bad if a client caught a disease from another.
Suppose one made a nanobot that dismantles known bacteria and viral proteins and uses them as raw materials to make additional nanobots. If one kept tools in this environment, the tool would stay sterile for cheap. (Presumably there is a means to prevent the nanobots from escaping, such as requiring them to stay within a power field not provided outside the toolbox.) In addition, if these nanobots could be taught not to attack human cells, and could be powered in a human body, then this would restore immune function to the immunocompromised. This would greatly increase their quality of life. In addition, immunocompromising diseases attack immune cells through attachments to their cell membrane. These nano-immune system devices do not have one of those.

Up and Down

2011-08-10T06:53:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but in May I was promoted to a different department, mail enforcement. Since then, my job has been to basically destroy spammers and make the world a better place. You probably have two or three less spams in your mailbox on average because I've what I've done. It also means that I have to constantly bug people about their email usage, which gets really depressing, really fast. I'm not fond of having to troll.
I also understand that I'm on the verge of another promotion, site security, which would mean that I would unhack all the hacked webpages, as well as explain how to avoid that happening to you in the future.
This has been good for me, and bad for you. Good for me because I make more, and have growing responsibility and a stronger, more awesome resume. Bad for you because I come home every night tired, sick, and soon whacked out on cough medicine. This state of affairs does not bode well for creativity. I'll be trying to strain through my every thought for the last few months to try and get an interesting idea going.
In the meantime, an interesting look at ludicriously dangerous chemistry in Sand Won't Save You This Time.

Pistol Shrimp Bot

2011-06-29T08:52:00.020-05:00

The pistol shrimp used to astound scientists: It did...something..., and then fish in front of it abruptly dropped dead. The fishy victim is then pulled inside the pistol shrimp's burrow and devoured. Clearly, this had to be studied.
It was discovered how this works by filming the shrimp firing in slow motion. All the shrimp does is close its claw really really fast. The rapidly increasing pressure causes a cavitation bubble with temperatures rivaling the surface of the sun. This then, surrounded by seawater, explodes slightly as everything condenses back to normal. The heat, pressure, and shock wave all injure the shrimp's prey, usually adding up to a fatality. And knowing all this gave me the idea to weaponize it.
The weaponized pistol shrimp robot would swim up to things we don't like underwater, such as the propellers of an enemy submarine. It would then bring a massive claw as close as possible as close to the propellers as possible, and then very abruptly close it. With a loud banging sound, the propellers are promptly damaged by the ensuing cavitation bubble, as cavitation is the bane of naval propellers everywhere. The submarine is now mobility-killed, and can be finished off with a cleverly placed depth charge if it continues to cause problems. Or if this is done to a surface ship, that ship isn't sailing anywhere anytime soon. If it causes more problems, it'll wind up torpedoed, or we could cavitation attack the hull to sink it.
The robot can then swim to the next target, as an enemy that has one boat probably has a lot more.
Unfortunately, this won't be too useful in modern warfare, as all our battles are mostly against asymmetric enemies who don't have navies, because they aren't nations. Most of our enemies now are insurgents, and stopping them requires a whole different type of fighting than the kind that stops nations.

Printing a brain

2011-06-28T06:13:00.000-05:00

Printed organs offer a major step towards immortality. I could take one cell from each of my organs, and use it to grow a brand new spare. I would then be guaranteed a very long life indeed, because disease or damage could be repaired fairly quickly by swapping my organs. Arteriosclerosis? New heart, no problem. Lung virus? New lungs. Cirrhosis? New liver. There'd be no chance of rejection, because they're grown from my own cells, and the cost would rapidly reduce over time from an economy of scale. However, if I had a stroke, or brain damage due to concussion, or became demented, I couldn't exactly swap out my brain. Or could I?
While if my brain were directly swapped out entirely, I would definitely be a different person, suppose only a small amount were changed at any given time. Starting with the moment that my doctor suspects that I'm developing a brain condition, I have a small amount of my brain biopsied and replaced with a printed copy of that section. This is allowed to heal and integrate back into my brain. Then a section a few inches further is biopsied and replaced, and over the course of about five years or so, every single piece is replaced. During the healing time, the neurons reestablish their connections, so at no point do I lose psychological continuity. And when the replacing is done, I have the brain of a twenty year old. If this works, then printing will make everyone immortal eventually. Well, not totally immortal, as you could still die from injuries, or if you have a brain condition that kills you in less time than it takes to replace-and-heal. But unaging and generally free of disease.
Or would you slowly lose your memory and personality over the course of the replacement?

Printing Organs

2011-06-27T06:29:00.002-05:00

An interesting innovation of modern times is deposition printers, which can produce any 3 dimensional object by laying it down layer by layer in melted plastic, which rapidly cools and solidifies into a layer of the final object. If an layer can't support itself structurally until complete, the system can also lay down a second type of plastic that washes away when exposed to water. Although the systems tend to be expensive (none cost less than $500), once you own one, you can have all the plastic parts you want for a few cents worth of thermoplastic.
Medical doctors have especially taken note. Human cells can be grown in a lab, but only in flat sheets about one cell thick. The cells know that they shouldn't endlessly grow upon each other, because when they do that, they're typically cancer. Cells in your body grow on a framework, an extracellular matrix. And here's where they have the idea.
Since the 3d printer can print any shape, have it print an extracellular matrix for an organ, wash it, and introduce it to a glucose-and-saline medium. Inject one human cell, and a short time later, you have a fully functional organ. Since extracellular matrix parts are regularly replaced, this new organ will, after being implanted, slowly replace its plastic extracellular matrix with a real one, at which point the organ will be indistinguishable from the original. Other than the new one is fresh and healthy and will last for years longer.
This is giving me an even crazier idea, which I will go into tomorrow.