I would think the short question to ask would be - "What doesn't DARPA fund?" They really should be FARPA - Fund Any Research Project Agency. I'm not complaining - just observing
At the University of Illinois, there was a project called the Biological Computing Laboratory, founded by Cyberneticist Heinz Von Foerster, which did research in second - order cybernetics. (a field devoted to those studies of information, communication, and control in which the observer of the system is an active part of that system, for example analyzing a conversation one is engaged in, or the political system one lives within, in terms of systems theory and information theory). I learned alot from older friends/mentors who were participants in this laboratory, which was shut down, in part, because of the passage of a law (I forget it's year or name), specifying that all defense money go to militarily usable research. The participants of the BCL unanimously refused to change their path of studies to be more directly applicable to military use, and the project lost all funding.
Apropos the article, it seems inevitable that technologies become smaller and smaller in their implementation, to some limit which we surely have not reached. One could have a mechanical Babbage difference engine style computer in a chip. One could have an analog chemical computer in a chip, even. Commonly used higher-order calculations could be replaced by parametricized measurements of an internal mechanical simulation. I don't know if any of these are of any practical use, but they intregue me.
-- ...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
Batteries stink
by
olman
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What strikes me as funny about all this is that it would be more efficient to run a tiny engine instead of using a battery. Engines have to deal with friction, which leads to waste heat. Batteries do generate a little heat, but that's it. In other words, it's not that the micro-engines are so great, it's that the batteries are so bad. Lithium-ion batteries are more user-friendly and a little bit more efficient than nickel-cadmium-batteries, but not by that much. Zinc-oxygen batteries are a real innovation, if only due to the fact that air's free. I'm not complaining, my hearing aid runs more than twice as long as with conventional batteries, but the Zinc-air battery prices are highway robbery.
Until we learn to store electricity in a reasonable manner, wacky ideas like microengines will probably stay around. I didn't see much mention in the article about how to deal with the heat and friction of higher-rpm-than-conventional-gas-turbine, so we can safely assume this stuff is not going to appear next year in circuit city.
Re:It ain't going to happen soon.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I don't know about the thermal properties of Silicon myself, but many people are working on such generators, using micromachining of silicon, and I'm sure they know what they are doing.
Your second point is meaningless. There are more ways than just magnetic induction to generate electricity, some of which have been sucesfully used in MEMS for generating power already. Didn't you search the academic literature before posting?
Your third point is, however, very valid. All these things scale very badly to micro scale.
Re:It ain't going to happen soon.
by
awol
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Whilst you are right about the missing pieces for nanatechnology (and indeed I have no position on the feasibility of the components of which you speak) there are a number of "necessary" components for these nanotech objects to work and without all of them the system is not feasible. One of the necessary components is probably a micro turbine and so it is newsworthy when the advances are made for once they exist, the solving of the other components reduce the number of missing "necessary" components before we have sufficient technology to try the whole deal.
-- "The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not complaining - just observing
At the University of Illinois, there was a project called the Biological Computing Laboratory, founded by Cyberneticist Heinz Von Foerster, which did research in second - order cybernetics. (a field devoted to those studies of information, communication, and control in which the observer of the system is an active part of that system, for example analyzing a conversation one is engaged in, or the political system one lives within, in terms of systems theory and information theory). I learned alot from older friends/mentors who were participants in this laboratory, which was shut down, in part, because of the passage of a law (I forget it's year or name), specifying that all defense money go to militarily usable research. The participants of the BCL unanimously refused to change their path of studies to be more directly applicable to military use, and the project lost all funding.
Apropos the article, it seems inevitable that technologies become smaller and smaller in their implementation, to some limit which we surely have not reached. One could have a mechanical Babbage difference engine style computer in a chip. One could have an analog chemical computer in a chip, even. Commonly used higher-order calculations could be replaced by parametricized measurements of an internal mechanical simulation. I don't know if any of these are of any practical use, but they intregue me.
...and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.'
What strikes me as funny about all this is that it would be more efficient to run a tiny engine instead of using a battery. Engines have to deal with friction, which leads to waste heat. Batteries do generate a little heat, but that's it. In other words, it's not that the micro-engines are so great, it's that the batteries are so bad. Lithium-ion batteries are more user-friendly and a little bit more efficient than nickel-cadmium-batteries, but not by that much. Zinc-oxygen batteries are a real innovation, if only due to the fact that air's free. I'm not complaining, my hearing aid runs more than twice as long as with conventional batteries, but the Zinc-air battery prices are highway robbery.
Until we learn to store electricity in a reasonable manner, wacky ideas like microengines will probably stay around. I didn't see much mention in the article about how to deal with the heat and friction of higher-rpm-than-conventional-gas-turbine, so we can safely assume this stuff is not going to appear next year in circuit city.
I don't know about the thermal properties of Silicon myself, but many people are working on such generators, using micromachining of silicon, and I'm sure they know what they are doing.
Your second point is meaningless. There are more ways than just magnetic induction to generate electricity, some of which have been sucesfully used in MEMS for generating power already. Didn't you search the academic literature before posting?
Your third point is, however, very valid. All these things scale very badly to micro scale.
Whilst you are right about the missing pieces for nanatechnology (and indeed I have no position on the feasibility of the components of which you speak) there are a number of "necessary" components for these nanotech objects to work and without all of them the system is not feasible. One of the necessary components is probably a micro turbine and so it is newsworthy when the advances are made for once they exist, the solving of the other components reduce the number of missing "necessary" components before we have sufficient technology to try the whole deal.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."