Slashdot Mirror
Where Are The Edges Of Today's Technology World?
Veeru writes "As
mentioned on Nova,
my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives
Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight
almost 100 years ago. Scientific
American had rejected
his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'. The secretive Wright Brothers
allowed Amos to publish
the article in his own Gleanings Bee magazine instead. Because of his objective account, other
experimenters may not have received the credit
they deserved. I recently realized
that Amos was intent on investigating
the highest tech advances of the day and that the airplane was the most
advanced phenomenon he could find. If
Amos were alive today, what obscure technology would he be
pursuing?"
We are living in an age quite different from 100 years ago. Information travels pretty fast. It is difficult for something that important to remain obscure so long today. Further, people more or less stopped noticing technological advances and taking them for granted. If any individual inventor/scientist gets some success he would want to approach venture capitalists, news papers, journals before he/she turns it into something great and useful. So, in my opinion it is difficult to find something obscure which is great. Yes, it is certainly possible that things people earlier thought wouldn't work becoming something great.
So if time travel is possible, where are all the tourists from the future?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
That was the expectation of the lead researcher in the documentary I saw. He suspects the moment they turn it on and it works, he expects to get a message sent back to him from the future. The catch though is the portal exists from the time it is turned on until it is shut down. Talk about a motive for uptime.
The future probably does not hold any technology that is perpetually 20 years off. Thus, in the future, we will not have:
- Practical fusion energy
- Human-capable artificial intelligence
- Flying cars
- Space tourism
- The end of Moore's Law
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
As such a machine does not currently exist, we couldn't use everyday experience to rule it out.
/. articles, it was a widely accepted fact that a human being would go insane from overload if he traveled faster that 35 mph. Just because we can't see how it could be done at this time does not mean it is impossible.
As mentioned in earlier
Wireless technologies provide endless ways to invade privacy - RFID, Credit Cards, Cell Phones, EZPass, PDA, GPS, subcutaneous transponders implanted when you walk through a mall entrance, Microsoft License activation, whatever.
Clearly the most important technology of the future will be the development of personal jammers to silence the RF nattering of the post-PC era world of gizmos carried about one's person, implanted under skin (overtly or surreptitiously) or attached into clothing. Everyone will be looking for RF cones of silence, ways to use a taser like device to EMP a wireless spybot picked up by walking into a movie theatre (or implanted by the Selective Service) or shielded pouches to prevent RF attacks on credit cards or other payment/identification devices.
If I was looking to report on bleeding edge tech, this is where I would look.
You think spyware like Gator is bad? You haven't seen nothing yet.
Flying's the easy part. It's the soft landing that's the bitch to get right...
That is all.
Check out the date on that article: September 10, 2001.
Talk about needing a machine to go back in time to warn people...
- "what substantial everyday product could be discovered/invented that we don't have already? We have cars, planes, phones, radios, musical instruments, diagnostic machines, robotics, computers, refrigerators, bass boats, thinkgeek.com...
I don't know. Maybe I'm a cynic but it seems to me that we've got pretty much everything we need."
I'm sure that not that long ago, someone said "We have the printing press, the locomotive, steamships, and the telegraph...It seems to me that we've got pretty much everything we need"They're all several trillion miles ahead of the solar system's travel through the universe, beacuse while they nailed down the bit about time travel, they completely forgot to include a coordinate system so they'd actually show up on earth.
So rather they ended up in space exactly where the earth was when they pressed "go" on their time machine.
It's complications like that that make me wonder if time travel hasn't already been invented, it's just the poor guy sent himself into a deadly vacuum.
5 grams put out 75 watts? That doesn't sound right.
Besides, we can't have people throwing radioactive materials in dumpsters now.
Please, can we stop calling it "nanotechnology" and start calling it what it really is?
CHEMISTRY!
I'm not trying to be funny. That new stain-defender stuff in pants? Apparently it's called nanotechnology. No! Chemistry! It's just chemistry! Stop subjecting your minds to buzzwords.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
Nuts. If we were to exploit the resources space offers us without going into any other major gravity wells (i.e., sticking to free space, asteroids, small moons, etc), there is (just off the top of my head):
- Enough energy for everyone alive in the world today to live better than the average American presently does.
- More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
- Enough room, sunlight, water etc. for us to feed many times our present population as well as we feed the richest few now.
- Enough room for all of us to spread out and live interesting lives.
What more do you want exactly?-- MarkusQ
You forgot the "IMHO" part...
You may think that space flight is a huge waste of dollars. Many others do not. So long as it's not your money being spent, why should you care? "Ah" you say, "but it *is* my money, 'cos NASA is taxpayer funded." But that's the beauty of the X-prize competition that the grandparent post was referring to - it's purely privately funded. So it really doens't matter what you think about space flight. They're going to do it anyway. Who knows, maybe you'll even derive some benefit from it at some point.
We have basic space filight now. Its fairly safe and the costs are resonable.
Uh, in a word, bullshit. Especially on the "costs are reasonable" part. It costs on the order of $500 Million for a single shuttle launch, and they only happen a few times a year (and require a standing army of several thousand to support them). The whole point of the X-prize is to develop cheap, reliable, regular space launch. Everyone in the space industry (and I speak here as someone in the space industry) views launch costs as one of the greatest impediments to doing more in space. That applies to unmanned as well as manned missions.
There is simple no return on investment in continued research.
I won't even bother to debate the stupidity of that comment. The fact that people are investing would tend to imply that there is at least some perception of an ROI. Although it may depend on what exactly you consider an adequate ROI, and what time scales you are operating on.
We have a space station or will very soon, we have the shuttle which works well enough.
See above for the shuttle. It costs a crapload. Far more than it needs to. Mostly as a result of a piss-poor design that was more political compromise than anything else. The station is a nice idea but appears to be a bit of a white elephant. Right now it can only deal with a crew of up to 3, which is not a sufficient number to allow any science to take place (too busy just maintaining the station). And my understanding from talking to folks in the science community is that the station is essentially useless for it purported primary purpose, microgravity research, because astronaut induced vibrations screw up the "microgravity" environment in all but a very small part of the station.
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
It's a cost/benefit thing - there's lots of stuff in space that's be nice to make use of, but it costs too much to get it right now. Why? Well, launch costs have a lot to do with that (see above). Highly recommend that you check out a report called "LEO on the Cheap" by Lt. Col. Jack London that discusses that cascading effects of high launch costs, and how to fix them (should be available in PDF form on line - google is your friend).
I read in some physics journal once that even if you could travel faster then the speed of light you probably need around 1 1/3 times the sqare of the mass you will be moving in fule.
Depends a lot on the efficiency of your engine. Alternatively, you could make use of something like a laser sail to accelerate - then you don't need to carry any fuel. A third alternative is not to accelerate to the speed of light, but to bypass it, i.e. use one of the various (somewhat flaky at this point) "warp drives" that have been proposed. All are at least as plausible (or more plausible) than a time travel machine. Incidentally, did it occur to you that time travel is equivalent to faster than light travel in the Einsteinian universe?
Not sure what this would be, sounds rather funky. When you say time travel however be very careful with that label, since to a casual observer it invariably means travel into the past.
<OT rant>
The whole idea of taking traveling to the past seriously is pretty annoying. Quite simply, time travel into the past is not possible without abandoning the idea of causality. We (individual human beings) are a product of a society and environment which is also a product of human beings. What we do impacts the world, and the world impacts us. Therefore, any human being sent back in time would be a product of an unaltered environment. He/she would alter the environment in some way (by their physical presence if nothing else, even if there were no human interaction) and impact the world around them. However, the exact world which created the time traveling human no longer exists, so that exact person can no longer exist, either. Paradox, violation of causality. Not allowed.
To forstall any comments like "I'm not impacted by an air current somewhere in Brazil's forests" consider a scenario like this: the very slight change in air currents eventually leads to a change in a weather pattern in the future, which causes a thunderstorm to develop, which produces a tornado, which runs over your house and uses you for a dartboard. Yes it is fanciful, probability may be 0.000000000000000000001% or less, but it is NOT impossible. And since it is not impossible, and since we assume causality is an absolute, any path which allows the possibility of violation of causality is forbidden. Ergo, no time travel which involves any kind of interaction with the past. Period.
Of course, this rules out a lot of situations that human beings find entertaining, but suspension of disbelief in movies doesn't ususally cause me problems. If trying to do real research in time travel however, you're gonna have to get around causality. If we throw out causality, the foundations of our understanding of our existance crumble, so the arguements had better be darn good.
</OT rant>
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
What's with all the useless links in Slashdot articles? Granted, this article's links are more relevant than most, but it's still got a lot of links that are unclear where they actually go. It's almost as if the article with the most links gets posted on the front page rather than the article with the most relative links. Usually, it's very difficult to tell where the links go, and which link will give you the information you need.
For instance, this article. The Nova link takes you directly to the initial article. That's useful, but typically on Slashdot, a link like this will actaully take you to Nova's root website. It's often the little thing after it that says "article" or "report on" that takes you to the actual article text. Amos Ives Root takes you to a paper on Amos Ives Root, in case you didn't know who he was. Useful, certainly, but the Nova article already gives a lot of background information. The Scientific American link doesn't bring you to Scientific American's root website like you'd think, nor does it link to article about how they initially rejected (though it's briefly mentioned as unconfirmed) the article, it's just a Scientific American article about the Wright Brothers. Useful in a way, but not really relevant to the conversation. "Rejected his article", which in keeping with the Slashdot style, you'd think would bring you to the article, or at least to Scientific American's article about rejecting the commentary, instead brings you to a sight about beekeeping. Granted, there is an article about the rejection, and Root did publish it in a paper about beekeeping, it seems incredibly off topic and obscure, and as short as the article is, not helpful.
The words Wright Brothers brings you to an article about the Wright Brothers. That's intuitive, and if someone didn't know about the Wright Brothers, they might could use it, but the Nova article contains much of the same data and renders this article ultimately redundant. "Publish the article" brings you to the actual article, which is welcome, but I didn't know that this link would actually bring me back the article text until I clicked on it for the sake of writing this comment. The link on other experimenters just brings you to another Slashdot article (+1 linking to Slashdot) about one particular early experimenter. There's not much actual data there (New Zealander Richard Pearse may have very well made several flights... before the Wright Brothers) and doesn't clear up the matter of other early pioneers of flight not getting credit. Oh wait, the next link, entitled "credit they deserve" brings you to another Slashdot article similar to the first. Now I understand.
Investigating links to yet another Slashdot article, this time a fairly irrelevant Ask Slashdot article on "Great Computer Science Papers?" Last, we have the technology link, which brings us to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference. Lots of good information, but not linked in a way that helps you understand what you'll be visiting if you click the link.
I don't mean to single out this author, but we have a Slashdot article that supposed to be about the Nova show on Amos Ives Root, and it contains ten links to various articles of various relevance, only one of which will bring you to the article you wish to read, and it's not even clear which link that is! This is quite common with Slashdot articles, and it makes Slashdot more than a bit difficult to navigate.
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The solar system travels through space relative to what, exactly? Which location would you use as a frame of reference to measure its travel through the cosmos?
The center of our galaxy?
The center of all the visible galaxies? Oh wait, that's our galaxy itself.
The center of the universe? Which center of the universe?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
You mean like your smoke detectors?
Maybe I'm a cynic but it seems to me that we've got pretty much everything we need.
If you think we have everything we need, you haven't put much thought into it. We still do not have cures for my diseases, nor methods of getting an object/person from one far away place to another within a matter of a few seconds (which would also be useful in the medical field if time is a factor to save a life). There are many more things that could be of use to us for both important and not as important reasons; you just have to stop and think about the problems and nuisances of life to come up with at least a few of them.
So, what "caused' you to be born with Green eyes as opposed to Blue Eyes? Why do men have vestigal nipples? These are phenominon that exist, but they do not have a "cause" par-se. Causality implies a concious action.
Now, if you are willing to entertain the idea that a higher power is pulling the strings then all issues of causality are neatly handled by "God", or "Chaos", or whatever you wish to call that system that orchestrates the absolutely preposerous chain of "coincidence" that our lives are made up of.
(Disclosure: I heavily lean toward the divine intervention camp.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Imagine if some guy in a garage in Wyoming managed to create some amazing new technology, be it cold fusion, a truly intuitive AI or some new medical treatment. What could this guy do? What would this guy do? Would he herald this new cutting edge technology, or would he hire a band of lawyers and seek to patent the technology? Would he not get any major corporate media to even report without them first dispatching some lackies to explore the exploitation potential? Would he have his idea snatched for a song by some corporate interest that quickly got wind of his discovery? And then if this new technology interfered with the profitable status quo of some very influential corporate entity, would it ever see the light of day?
The cutting edge of technology in modern society is being progressively dulled to butter-knife sharpness by our propensity to let ourselves be entertained into submission and medocrity via the media.
Chris Rock said it most poignantly when he pointed out that advanced in medicine haven't cured anything. Why? Because it's more profitable for you to "live with" an affliction than it is to cure it. The art of discovery takes a back seat to the process of material gain.
Nowadays, the majority of most people who aspire to create something truly innovative are preoccupied with grants and monetary issues that dwarf the energy they wish to spend on the art of discovery. It's the Roman decline revisited.
This is one of the most ill-thought out and contradictory posts I have read. This guy complains about how some technologies are insufficiently "boolean"; he cites flying cars, robots, automated kitchens, nanotechnology, and "genetic solutions" as examples. Flying, he suggests, is the opposite, in that "you fly or you dont fly". The absurdity here is that by his definition all these other technologies batch this boolean ideal, in that there have been flying cars, there exist robots that clean the house, automated kitchens, nanotechnologies, and certainly genetic research has yielded vast numbers of new knowledge and applicable treatments.
The idea he fails to grasp is that flight is not really an all-or-nothing technology, at least not in terms of its impact and importance. Would it have been particularly useful if planes remained what they were at their conception? The original flying machine built by the Wrights was celebrated when it flew a distance most of us would walk. For this tech to be really meaningul took many, many years of work and continous research, both directly applied to aviation and general research with no specific applications, such as materials science, mechanical engineering, etc. It is only through a great deal of progress that flight has become as important a technology as it is today.
Similarly, the technologies the parent poster mentions require extensive work and research to bear fruit. While there are robots that can clean a whole house, they are proof-of-concepts that cost more than my car. Similar to flight, advances need to be made before it has practical applications.
I find it somewhat humorous that he states "I'm skeptical of current nanotechnology and genetic solutions actually being major breakthroughs" when if you talk to anyone receiving current chemotherapy their lives may have been saved by these breakthroughs for which he has so much skepticism. While I encourage a healthly degree of distrust, this needs to be well directed. The fact is that new technologies and new research needs to continue in every field, and if new knowledge is being obtaining by good scientific methods, and someone is willing to spend their time obtaining it, it is hard to say that that is worthless or should be stymied.
Nanotech needs AI? WTF?
I wish all technology followed moore's law ; )
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I think we are still at the very beginning of the information age... I can't imagine what kind of information storage and retrieval devices we will have in 100 years.
I'm not talking star-trek here.. let's look at what is technically feasible now, even if it's not economically viable.
Storing terabytes of information per cubic inch of some material, with picosecond access times.
Communication - Despite regulatory stifling of the internet.. the concept that if we follow standards, and cooperate, we can leverage all kinds of communication mediums, is here now. Speeds are going up and up.. the "last mile" problem is just momentary.
So.. as our ability to store and move information goes up and up.. so what?
We are getting good at digitizing things, too.
Movies. Audio.
3d scanners. Motion capture. Auto-generated 3d meshes from image analysis of 2d images...
Despite no real big noise about it now, there is ongoing progressive work in the field of image recognition.
Teleconferencing.
VoIP.
Wireless... look at what's happenign there. Look how much 802.11b stuff is changing how we think about wireless.. how many mom & pop outfits are providing services over it.. and that's a TINY, TINY slice of spectrum.. what would happen if we REALLY got serious about open wireless communcation?
How about Erwin Schroedinger?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
You are missing the point. If you have blind, unquestioning faith, then no empirical evidence can overturn your dogma, as it is true because you believe it is, any evidence otherwise can SOMEHOW be explained away if you try hard enough.
You can be sure you always making the right decision when you define 'right decision' as whatever is in accordance with what some book tells you the right decision is.
Don't confuse 'Being totally sure of yourself due to blind faith' with being 'right' in a rationalistic way.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
You are wrong. Atheism, etymologically, and in terms of common and scholarly usage, means exactly what the OED says it means: "Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of a God." Note that it can mean 'not believing in' as well as 'believing in the non-existence of.'
The thing is we we rarely see anything "new". It's pretty much all based on old stuff. The refrigerator for example was an improvement on the ice box which was the original invention to store food for an extended time period without smoking or drying it. That icebox was a true invention. The telephone was as well. The radio was. The light bulb was. The electric motor was. The original drum recorder evolved into the phonograph (record player - used pressed or engraved vinyl discs and a needle to make the sounds for the under 25 crowd) was and evolved into the CD. The steam engine was original but it evolved into a gas engine.
My point is, aside from some technologies that are digital or chemical processes we just don't see too many "original" ideas. They're all pretty much improvements or alterations of existing ideas. I know I'm drifting out to sea here but I wonder where the truly revolutionary original ideas for products have all gone. It seems like everything we come up with now is more for convenience sake than it is truly revolutionary.
Slashdot is not an original idea. There were message boards long before the computer.
Have you hugged your penguin today?
Science does believe in lifters, but they're just air ion engines, and I have to laugh at the very poor experimental technique and bad logic of those who try to "prove" they're anything but that. Dowsing: you know, anywhere in the part of the midwest I live in, you could jiggle your dowsing rod & be correct, there's a water table everywhere. Cold fusion: very reputable scientists have tried to duplicate the results, but could nothing conclusive found. Just as an aside, at U.of I. some of the senior physics professors did a number of interesting experiments to see if they could find a "fifth force" that some elements supposedly possess, and the reason I bring that up is that you're wrong if you think mainstream scientists will reject new ideas out of hand.
I think the really interesting technologies will come from out of nowhere.
Too many people kept waiting for AI to produce "thinking computers" and they are still waiting.
Too many people think nano-technology to work wonders and they are still trying to make simple gears do something useful.
Too many people think that Microsoft invented computing and don't realize that most of what we have today is simply re-hashing of things from the 60's, but in smaller cases.
Too many people think that Howard Dean invented the Internet (3 years ago they thought it was Al Gore) and don't realize that most of his policies were borrowed from Pat Buchanan.
We basically suffer from short term memory, short attention span and hero-worship that expects someone to come along and magically fix things without disruption to our lives. Fortunately there are some real thinkers who are not constrained by these stumbling blocks and are off doing real work. I expect them to come up with things that we haven't even considered, and then Microsoft or Howard Dean, or the like will take credit for it (and get away with it for the most part).
Am I a cynic? Yeah, but only based on past experience.
write a rebuttal or link to one in order to support your point. Personally I welcomed Joy's essay as a counterpoint to the writings of people like Kurzweil who can gloss over the rough spots in the technological world.
Photos.
I take that to mean that an atheist takes nothing simply on "faith", but instead requires imperical evidence.
1: It's "empirical". (bonus karma if you can catch the grammatical mistakes I'm bound to be making here--and no, that period-outside-of-a-quote is kosher.)
2: Atheists are no more able to not take things on faith than the rest of us; were that true, they wouldn't believe in some major historical figures.
Atheists, by and by, simply do not engage in religious discussions on the same level that "theists" do--and, honestly, that causes more confusion than anything else about atheism, even the whole strong/weak split.
(As for the original parent comment: I'm a chrisitan, and two moral compasses that I follow are "if everyone on earth did this, would the world be a better or a worse place" and "does this action hurt someone else to help the actor, or hurt the actor to hurt someone else?" Neither one of these requires a communication from the Almighty, which is, IMO, how He wants it.)
Well, according to the theory presented in the parent post about the possibility of travelling to any time in which the maching had actually been turned on, one could in-fact travel farther into the past if there were a naturally occuring event that produces the same results, yet has been around for significantly longer. That being the case, then you could theoretically travel backwards from now using one of those naturally occuring corridors.
About causality, it's generally thought that no, you can't change your own past. The whole point of H.G. Well's book was that he couldn't change the past, because it was the past that caused him to create the time machine. Now if we throw into the equation the possiblity of a multiverse, then we have a whole new way of looking at the problem. Sure, time travel is possible, but it wouldn't be time travel per-se, it would be multiverse travel. Since the multiverse that you travelled to, never intersects the multiverse you came from, then you wouldn't have any fear of screwing up past events, because anything that you did would only affect the future of that multiverse, and not the multiverse that you originated from. The problem with that is, in order for you to be able to return to your proper time, you would have to locate exactly which multiverse that you came from, and follow the progress of that multiverse foward the amount of time you had been gone.. with billions of possiblities, then you're pretty well screwed because in those billions of possiblities, you will have only actually returned in one.
Okay, now my head hurts...
If you're looking here for something insightful or thought provoking, you're probably looking in the wrong place.
The center of the universe? Which center of the universe?
If you were on the time machine engineering team, and you were tasked with this part of the problem, I would say your search to find a fixed reference point to make absolute measurements off of is overly hard and possibly not even useful.
How would you _know_ motion for objects sent through time is going to match relative motion from the center of the universe (or anything else)?
Perhaps a better/much easier strategy is to stick with relative measurements; send something back in time 1/1000th of a second. Record relative movement from the starting point. Send something back 1/100th, 1/10th, etc. etc., recording movement.
Continue so you get a nice large sample set, plot the data, generate a model describing the interaction between time jump vs. distance jump. Test the model to see that it behaves as expected, if not, experiment more until it is felt your model is adequately debugged.
You will then have a useful way of predicting what will happen, without ever having needed to base things on any absolute measurement. Seeking the center of the universe for a fixed reference is now a moot point.
You don't need to have absolute measurements to do useful things. +5vdc being used in various places within your computer as your read this? Knowing that relative value is all that is necessary; the fact that the absolute (if there were such a thing) voltage of that same circuit is actually +30,005vdc doesn't keep us from getting the job done.
Arthur C. Clarke posited a statement that has come to be known as Clarke's Law: 'We tend to OVERestimate short-term changes and UNDERestimate long-term changes.' If you look at sci-fi from the 1950's, you see starships that travel faster than light, but all of the astrogation and calculation of co-ordinates being done by teams of humans. They simply didn't foresee 50 years ago that computing power would become too cheap to measure. My Sprint PDA phone has an embedded processor with more computing power than a 50's-era mainframe. This would be simply unfathomable to someone from back then. The problem with foreseeing the future is that most people simply extrapolate from the present, and are unable to anticipate second-, third-, and nth-order effects. That's not how the real world works.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman