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Spray-On Computers
Jack William Bell writes "Edinburgh University has funding for a program to create spray on computers. The basic idea is to make thousands of tiny 'silicon specks' or 'smart sand' (a step larger than smart dust) which work together via wireless networking to provide 'ubiquitous computing.' No, the idea itself isn't new. But it is interesting to see someone actually working on it. The initial application is a spray you apply to the chest of heart patients, creating a sensor array to report their health back to the hospital."
The idea of spraying silicon chips directly onto patients should be approached with caution.
Ever build one of those crystal radio kits you got from RadioShack as a kid? Those had way larger components than we're talking here, and they were powered by small electric currents from the AM (Amplitude Modulation) radio waves.
With these spray-on computers, you could easily add a small circuitry that could provide power just from stray radio waves. IIRC you would just need a magnetic coil, a diode and a transistor. That would provide plenty of power for the scale we're talking here.
There is only one working solution: to etch the antenna on the surface of the chip, and then to point some radar transmitter at it. However it will cook you within seconds :-)
As I said, those guys need to come up with a battery before they can think of anything else. This is especially important if they want to use wireless, since it involves parting with the energy.
1. the site is not slasdotted
2. the "repost" has the following: "micael's retardnesses "
Yeah, complexity grows exponentially, but only if a cell is allowed to comunicate with any other, that's not the 'right' way to do it.
Local communications, seeking global behaviour (biological-like way) seems to be a better way.
Mod this down.
Just in case you missed it, here's a little line toward the end:
"The money will allow the scientists to see the technology working to cre ***micael's retardnesses*** within four years."
The stars were added for emphasis.
no nano- means extremely small, it comes from the greek word nanos meaning dwarf
XML's textual nature keeps XML documents "open". I did a Google search a while ago when trying to determine whether there was a standard scheme for putting binary data into XML, and came across somebody discussing parse times for XML. He'd written a program which parsed XML and saved the parsed version in a binary format, and found that it was actually faster to just parse the XML again than to reconstruct the information from his binary format.
On one hand, sure, perhaps his coding wasn't up to the level of those who'd written the XML parser, which might account for the slower loading.
On the other hand, there's a good chance that someone writing an XML parser intended for general inclusion within other programs is paying a lot more attention to doing things right (in terms of speed, security, etc.) than the person who writes a quick data-parsing routine.
Computers don't care if humans can read their data, sure. But, humans do. Parsing a simple, well-defined text format isn't computationally expensive, and makes the job easier for those who might have cause to view the data.
Finally, XML tags can and do carry important semantic information. It's much easier to write a program to parse an arbitrary unknown XML schema (say, GnuCash's file format) than to have to reverse-engineer an arbitrary unknown binary format (yes, I've done both). This is important because it helps to ensure that the data isn't quite as bound to the program -- parsing and conversion between schemas is generally much easier than, say, translating a WordPerfect document to MS Word format.
Hans Reiser has even decided to use text in his transaction-control syscalls:
Text parsing isn't as bad as people like to make it, as long as you aren't parsing a horribly ugly specification (like, say, C++ code).
Besides, how is carrying something on top of HTTP going to introduce new security holes? I haven't been able to decide where you are implying the issues might arise.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Its interessting to reflect a bit on current technology when discussing "science fiction" like this.
Reseachers at Berkely have developed a single chip sensor node called the spec . Although this node lacks sensors, it clearly demonstrates the potential of the approach, even using existing technology and implements the basic platform for a sensor node in 5 mm (thats 2.379E-5 cubic furlongs for the metricly challenged). This node have very low power requirements and are capable of communication of more than 10 meter at 19kbps.
This year the ACM holds its first international conference on sensor systems, SenSys 2003. A number of problems will most likely be adressed by this conference, moving the sensor network research forward.
Personally I think the visions are quite viable. It is correct that power sources (esp. batteries) are a major trouble, but there are many sources to be investigated, and solutions will be found. The worst problem with sensor networks are probably privacy (you thought RFID's were bad? How about sensors that you can not see, that communicates encrypted on unknown random spread spectrums freqs?) - Vernor Vinge have written a couple of (science fiction) books, where sensor networks are used in ways that will be a bit scary to the average privacy-aware slashdot reader....