And if you're interested in following up on this perhaps with a community of open source hardware advocates and engineers, you might want to try something like the open manufacturing mailing list. "We bring free and open source software development methodology to the physical world."
Some of the more interesting threads have been documented here.
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces. Be warned that TechShop is a commercial entity in this market, while many hackerspaces are non-profit. TechShop is a franchise with a gym membership model, so with it comes the same pains.
please flood the emotiv.com forums with requests to go open source. I would also be interested in funding a knock-off. I have manufacturing space and some hackers already on it.. but in the eternal words of Moff Jerjerrod, "I need more men."
About damn time, I say. For the past few years I have browsed the web with hundreds of tabs at a time. Firefox tends to crash after 50 tabs. Opera tends to crash at about 450 tabs. Some of this varies with RAM, but we're all familiar with the firefox single-thread issues, which really puts a downer on things. Let the window manager do its job: tabbing is for losers. Also what's with the insistence on keeping all tabs in RAM anyway?
I've been working on some scripts to use with uzbl.. in particular, I hate the web, surfraw is great, if it only worked. Web scraping utilities don't always work because webmasters insist on changing layouts, templates, HTML, and don't understand how to make long-term APIs for their content. So, my plan is to make something like xpather (from firefox) that allows a user to select elements on a page and figure out the xpath to retrieve the data. This can be dumped into a standard scraper definition file format or something, and then uzbl only has to pop up whenever some idiot changes a web page. Until then, these scrapers harvest data for me.
Then all of us web-haters can send these xpath scraper template files around and live in harmony, or something.
This is very exciting as it could point to a future where you can literally hack your own brain.
Do you have a backup?
You have to sandbox it. You do not want to randomly delete a random neurotransmitter receptor from the brain, as an example. You need to make experiments that test this on organotypical slices of neurons [or grow brains in a jar]. Kind of like in a neurofarm. But the problem with neurofarms is that you need to have millions of nodes of experimentation, or massive Markram simulations because of the number of chemical possibilities at all of the receptor sites, plasma membranes, dendritic/axonic connectional possibilities, minicolumn rules, etc. How are you going to get that many nodes, that many instances of experimentation? Sounds like a job for a clanking replicator, really. Maybe automated manufacturing. And while you are working on this, how about some open source rTMS?
There are a number of open source groups that are interested in going forward with spacetech. This isn't your typical NSS, L5, Mars Soc., or other "write to your representatives" ordeal - this is more like the NewSpace groups - Google Lunar X Prize teams (Interplanetary Ventures, Team FREDNET, Team Cringely, etc.).
One of the projects I am participating in is a free / open source manufacturing system, a repository of models and manufacturing instructions ("fabhat" like redhat), geared towards space exploration. An explanation can be found here and here, with a mailing list accessible from here. We're on freenode in #hplusroadmap (see this for help). Hope some Slashdotters will show up.:-)
There are other groups out there, so if you want a huge list, try my linkdump, and also see OpenVirgle -- an offshoot of Google's Project Virgle.
What started as an April Fool joke by Google for 2008 called Project Virgle is now a real and genuine effort by an increasing number of people to create ideas and ways in which humankind can live sustainably in space using free and open source technology. This project is a place for all space enthusiasts to cooperate on simulations of space settlements. Rather than argue whether L5 or Mars or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn should be humankind's first space settlement, we could be asking what is common between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared.
So no longer is "space advocacy" is enough. You have to actually do it for it to count at all. Btw, for anybody interested, the manufacturing system is based off of debian apt (apt-get install, but for spacetech) and gentoo portage and other repository systems. Technically it's just git, but with elements of the semantic web sprinkled in. A physical "grounding" of the semantic web so that we can assemble the massive amounts of information on the net and apply it towards various goals -- space habitats, von Neumann probes, astrochickens, sugar rockets, but also other non-space based systems (which will eventually be required anyway). To demonstrate the system (dubbed OSCOMAK, SKDB, sometimes metarepo), we're starting with origami instructions. Something sufficiently simple.:-)
The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. OSCOMAK stands for "OSCOMAK Semantic Community On Manufactured Artifacts and Know-how".
I drew up some plans to make what I call a "moontank". At the moment, the design is for cyanobacteria, however adding plants would be an interesting modification. The idea is to use a vacuum chamber here on earth and to make up something that looks like the same environment as found on the moon. Sprinkle in some bacteria, do some directed selection experiments, and see what we can get out of it.
Alright, neat. And we get it: RepRap hasn't gone much of any where fast. So let's fix that. Check out all of the DIY semiconductor manufacturing stuff out there on the net, there's various ideas like using graphene substrates and scanning probe lithography tips from $100 AFM/STM machines, but even if this is inserted into RepRap, there's some machining problems with it in the sense that the frame may be unstable. So, alternatives.
Self-replicating machines have been studied over the past four billion years, by cells. It is possible. You are living proof of this. Moshe Sipper cites proofs that it can be evolved [1]. von Neumann, Conway, Wolfram, etc., have been studying it in terms of cellular automata. More recently: Freitas, Merkle, Drexler. There are two approaches that we have been focusing on: (1) solid state fabrication, and (2) control of biological self-replication, either through hijacking cells, Minimal Genome Projects [2], synthetic biology and in vitro modeling, cells from the ground up like in PACE [3], and with DNA sequencers [4] and DNA synthesizers [5], automated evolutionary engineering and amorphous programming [6] is coming closer to reality. Either way (solid state or wet), we will win.
Sometime in the 1980s Freitas proposed a von Neumann probe ("star probe") [7] but it didn't actually include the self-replication specifications. Fail. But he did write a good book on kinematic self-replicating machines [8]. More recently there's been RepRap, CBA, fabberathome, diamondoid mechanosynthesis, but frankly none of these have concrete proposals. So. I am bruteforcing it. From the ground up. Over at [9] and [10]. Think of the project as a materials database and "social knowledge" database. When there's enough content, it'll be simple to write some software to recurse through all of the projects and find parts that can "loop around" which are -- supposedly -- the construction plans for a self-replicating machine. The idea is to make a database like aptitude or CPAN with various namespaces for specifying knowledge while then also automating the use of that knowledge in the form of programs related to various packages, very much like the biobrick registry [11] except please understand there's problems with the BBF standards at the moment. Aptitude (debian stuff) works not because there's some magical software search functionality, but rather the social diffusion of the program and a way to search for packages from our common language and ways of describing general things.
Should either #1 or #2 happen to fail, we can still produce machines that produce machines that produce something else, which is an elaborate way of trying to artifiically increase the rate of production. But it may be something that we have to come to terms with. That we can self-replicate suggests that we may not have to 'come to terms'. An alternate method might be symbiosis with humans, since humans can self-replicate successfully, and if we can somehow couple a way to have a machine to be self-assembled with each person... but surely a simpler mechanism is possible. That's worst-case scenario. Also, amorphous programming generally sucks for linear programmers. You basically have to 'evolve' your programs, and then make sure you can get some good biomolecules from cells that will make what you want, and on and on and on (but yes, there are other amorphous programming opportunities that we can envision, such as with molecular nanotechnology (other than cells), but where is it and how does it solve anything?).
Interesting possibilities with macroscale solid state self-replication: Abundance4All, one replicator per person on the planet within 33 days, fast processing of massive matter/energy streams, any of the scenarios in Orion's Arm,... personally I am looking forward to the prospects of using self-replication as a way to make supercomputers or neurofarms to experiment with brains (whether Henry Markram computational neurosci simulations or hard-physical) so that I
Check this out:
* STM/AFM machines for $100 - use a very finely pointed wire to scan across a surface at tens of thousands of atoms per second (raster scanning) to visualize the super small. Hear anything about nanolithography? Hop to it.
* STM-based DNA sequencing [nanopores?]. Rumor has it that ZS Genetics is going to be doing this by the end of 2008.
* DIY graphene transistors -- this was the subject of a recent article. Might be better than semiconductor nanocrystal synthesis (like Kovio). You can do this a few ways, such as punching holes in graphene (very dense pencil marks), or scanning probe lithography, chemical etchants like in si fabbing, etc.
* Have I missed anything?
SciAm is running an April 2008 article on graphene, so here are my notes on graphene fabrication. This is pretty neat, and worth some amateur experimentation. You can make the AFM/STM for ~$100 USD. As for graphene, there are some instructions on that page for chemically synthesizing it, or just use pencil graphite and write over a piece of paper. Another cool idea is figuring if we can use mechanical force to use a very thin pencil tip to write a circuit. JohnFlux in ##physics on freenode mentions that resistors could be used as a poor man's piezo, just heat up the metal (or perhaps pencil) and it will move. It will move very slowly. But a start.
Team FREDNET, Team Cringely, and Interplanetary Ventures are all friendly groups of people to look into. Cringely has a wiki up for his project, and FREDNET has a rover going, and Interplanetary Ventures has facebook presence. I did a link dump a few days ago, so go check out all of the teams -- they need contributors, even web programmers willing to bootstrap the communities.
1) Figure out the genes involved via a bioinformatics database.
2) Order the genes - look up oligonucleotide synthesis companies, or DIY with the open source machine.
3) Download the biokit for do-it-yourself genetic engineering.
4) ??? (tanks, supplies, tissue culture, obtaining zebra fish and feed...)
5) See-through zebra fish.
I recently published some material on my site on incubation theory, which basically states that insights can occur in the background. Some quotes from the page.
I have especially noticed this fact in regard to ideas coming to me in the morning or evening in bed while in a semi-hypnagogic state.... Perhaps we ought to seek the explanation in that preliminary period of conscious work which always precedes all fruitful unconscious labor. Permit me a rough comparison. Figure the future elements of our combinations as something like the hooked atoms of Epicurus. During the complete repose of the mind, these atoms are motionless, they are, so to speak, hooked to the wall; so this complete rest may be indefinitely prolonged without the atoms meeting, and consequently without any combination between them. On the other hand, during a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain of them are detached from the wall and put in motion. They flash in every direction through the space (I was about to say the room) where they are enclosed, as would, for example, a swarm of gnats or, if you prefer a more learned comparison, like the molecules of gas in the kinematic theory of gases. Then their mutual impacts may produce new combinations. What is the role of the preliminary conscious work? It is evidently to mobilize certain of these atoms, to unhook them from the wall and put them in swing. We think we have done no good, because we have moved these elements a thousand different ways in seeking to assemble them, and have found no satisfactory aggregate. But, after this shaking up imposed upon them by our will, these atoms do not return to their primitive rest. They freely continue their dance. Now, our will did not choose them at random; it pursued a perfectly determined aim. The mobilized atoms are therefore not any atoms whatsoever; they are those from which we might reasonably expect the desired solution. Then the mobilized atoms undergo impacts which make them enter into combinations among themselves or with other atoms at rest which they struck against in their course. Again I beg pardon, my comparison is very rough, but I scarcely know how otherwise to make my thought understood.
And:
Incubation sometimes requires a very long break: Feynman noted that "You have to do six months of very hard work first and get all the components bumping around in your head, and then you have to be idle for a couple of weeks, and then - ping - it suddenly falls into place..." (Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995, p. 350).
Think about it, a single gene. Go to protocols-online, grab a few documents pertaining to viral gene therapy, encode the correct gene that you want to modify, and let's do viral intelligence enhancement. Granted, this is Slashdot, so the virus will have to be transported at first via needle and vile instead of sex, but whatever.
The paper shows that BIND 9 DNS queries are predictable i.e. that the source UDP port and DNS transaction ID can be effectively predicted. A predictability algorithm is described that, in optimal conditions, provides very few guesses for the "next" query (10 in the basic attack, and 1 in the advanced attack), thereby overcoming whatever protection offered by the transaction ID mechanism. This enables a much more effective DNS cache poisoning than the currently known attacks against BIND 9. The net effect is that pharming attacks are feasible against BIND 9 caching DNS servers, without the need to directly attack neither DNS servers nor clients (PCs). The results are applicable to all BIND 9 releases [1], when BIND (the named daemon) is in caching DNS server configuration.
Anyway, it looks like there's the opportunity here to *improve* this search engine -- programmers, I know you are reading, and at least check out the code. There's been talk about running some competitions for improving the search results (the scoring algorithms), how many of us would like to form a team? Maybe I'll do one. Who's with me?
(Btw, these guys need help. I just found all of this after the recent news articles.) Screw my mod points.
The most interesting application of anywhere nearly intelligent agents might very well be 'mindbots', the concept of having small programs take whiff of your thoughts and expand them, whether into complete and gramatically correct sentences, or into searches across the internet and to return some pretty package of bits and bytes for your reading pleasure (or productivity). You'd probably install a variety of these bots, one for some simple computer algebra system, another for reciting poetry, or one to replay visual recordings, etc. And so the upcoming neuroengineering competitions are going to be very interesting... but not necessarily involving the traditional AGI folk.
Over at the Orion's Arm mailing list a week ago, this topic came up too: they were calling it a 'death star' galaxy.
Or possibly a Type III Kardashev civ taking issue with the occupants of a nearby galaxy (or *maybe* an S6 or even S7 Galaxy Brain trying to insure a rival doesn't achieve the same status and threaten it?)! Looks like a cosmic beat-down either way!
Anyway, the galaxies have many awesome processes -- nebulas, supernovae, supermassive blackholes and that strange darkmatter 'void' -- some that we can, perhaps, take advantage of.
query: lenses circuits wax Intel
result: MY OWN PAGE *argh* (re: analytical instrumentation)
I also get: "Bryan's page on semiconductor manufacturing" which is also,
alas, me. But the page contains just as far as I've been able to get so
far: how to take sand and extract silicon from it, into giant crystals
that you can pull. The next step is to use diamond saws or diamond wire
to cut the silicon crystals into the wafers that you start with. The
diamond wire is very costly: it apparently degrades after a few uses.
So I haven't been able to figure out how to make my own diamond wire
yet. Another option might be to use high-powered lasers to cut the
silicon. Not sure about that one. Then, the next step is to go back
over Wikibooks book re: photolithography and the chemical etching
process, which I also have on my/notes.html file on my website. I need
to flow chart the whole operation soon.
How can we achieve fabbing@home?
- distribute the components across a city, absorb cost
- ship each incremental stage to different members
-- costly packaging, but pricing absorbed by people able to afford each
individual component of the stage.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess he bought a segway... to his coffin.
*sigh* I'll show^W^W^W^W segway myself the door.
And if you're interested in following up on this perhaps with a community of open source hardware advocates and engineers, you might want to try something like the open manufacturing mailing list. "We bring free and open source software development methodology to the physical world."
Some of the more interesting threads have been documented here.
- Bryan
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces. Be warned that TechShop is a commercial entity in this market, while many hackerspaces are non-profit. TechShop is a franchise with a gym membership model, so with it comes the same pains.
please flood the emotiv.com forums with requests to go open source. I would also be interested in funding a knock-off. I have manufacturing space and some hackers already on it.. but in the eternal words of Moff Jerjerrod, "I need more men."
You should try typing out the lecture. Here are my results through high school and college (and for the record, you're all wimps and sissies):
biology notes
Building Brains (it was a quasi "ai" class)
psych
other crap
Also: learn LaTeX.
About damn time, I say. For the past few years I have browsed the web with hundreds of tabs at a time. Firefox tends to crash after 50 tabs. Opera tends to crash at about 450 tabs. Some of this varies with RAM, but we're all familiar with the firefox single-thread issues, which really puts a downer on things. Let the window manager do its job: tabbing is for losers. Also what's with the insistence on keeping all tabs in RAM anyway?
.. in particular, I hate the web, surfraw is great, if it only worked. Web scraping utilities don't always work because webmasters insist on changing layouts, templates, HTML, and don't understand how to make long-term APIs for their content. So, my plan is to make something like xpather (from firefox) that allows a user to select elements on a page and figure out the xpath to retrieve the data. This can be dumped into a standard scraper definition file format or something, and then uzbl only has to pop up whenever some idiot changes a web page. Until then, these scrapers harvest data for me.
I've been working on some scripts to use with uzbl
Then all of us web-haters can send these xpath scraper template files around and live in harmony, or something.
One of the projects I am participating in is a free / open source manufacturing system, a repository of models and manufacturing instructions ("fabhat" like redhat), geared towards space exploration. An explanation can be found here and here, with a mailing list accessible from here. We're on freenode in #hplusroadmap (see this for help). Hope some Slashdotters will show up.
There are other groups out there, so if you want a huge list, try my linkdump, and also see OpenVirgle -- an offshoot of Google's Project Virgle.
So no longer is "space advocacy" is enough. You have to actually do it for it to count at all. Btw, for anybody interested, the manufacturing system is based off of debian apt (apt-get install, but for spacetech) and gentoo portage and other repository systems. Technically it's just git, but with elements of the semantic web sprinkled in. A physical "grounding" of the semantic web so that we can assemble the massive amounts of information on the net and apply it towards various goals -- space habitats, von Neumann probes, astrochickens, sugar rockets, but also other non-space based systems (which will eventually be required anyway). To demonstrate the system (dubbed OSCOMAK, SKDB, sometimes metarepo), we're starting with origami instructions. Something sufficiently simple.
OSCOMAK: - Bryan
I drew up some plans to make what I call a "moontank". At the moment, the design is for cyanobacteria, however adding plants would be an interesting modification. The idea is to use a vacuum chamber here on earth and to make up something that looks like the same environment as found on the moon. Sprinkle in some bacteria, do some directed selection experiments, and see what we can get out of it.
Alright, neat. And we get it: RepRap hasn't gone much of any where fast. So let's fix that. Check out all of the DIY semiconductor manufacturing stuff out there on the net, there's various ideas like using graphene substrates and scanning probe lithography tips from $100 AFM/STM machines, but even if this is inserted into RepRap, there's some machining problems with it in the sense that the frame may be unstable. So, alternatives.
... but surely a simpler mechanism is possible. That's worst-case scenario. Also, amorphous programming generally sucks for linear programmers. You basically have to 'evolve' your programs, and then make sure you can get some good biomolecules from cells that will make what you want, and on and on and on (but yes, there are other amorphous programming opportunities that we can envision, such as with molecular nanotechnology (other than cells), but where is it and how does it solve anything?).
... personally I am looking forward to the prospects of using self-replication as a way to make supercomputers or neurofarms to experiment with brains (whether Henry Markram computational neurosci simulations or hard-physical) so that I
Self-replicating machines have been studied over the past four billion years, by cells. It is possible. You are living proof of this. Moshe Sipper cites proofs that it can be evolved [1]. von Neumann, Conway, Wolfram, etc., have been studying it in terms of cellular automata. More recently: Freitas, Merkle, Drexler. There are two approaches that we have been focusing on: (1) solid state fabrication, and (2) control of biological self-replication, either through hijacking cells, Minimal Genome Projects [2], synthetic biology and in vitro modeling, cells from the ground up like in PACE [3], and with DNA sequencers [4] and DNA synthesizers [5], automated evolutionary engineering and amorphous programming [6] is coming closer to reality. Either way (solid state or wet), we will win.
Sometime in the 1980s Freitas proposed a von Neumann probe ("star probe") [7] but it didn't actually include the self-replication specifications. Fail. But he did write a good book on kinematic self-replicating machines [8]. More recently there's been RepRap, CBA, fabberathome, diamondoid mechanosynthesis, but frankly none of these have concrete proposals. So. I am bruteforcing it. From the ground up. Over at [9] and [10]. Think of the project as a materials database and "social knowledge" database. When there's enough content, it'll be simple to write some software to recurse through all of the projects and find parts that can "loop around" which are -- supposedly -- the construction plans for a self-replicating machine. The idea is to make a database like aptitude or CPAN with various namespaces for specifying knowledge while then also automating the use of that knowledge in the form of programs related to various packages, very much like the biobrick registry [11] except please understand there's problems with the BBF standards at the moment. Aptitude (debian stuff) works not because there's some magical software search functionality, but rather the social diffusion of the program and a way to search for packages from our common language and ways of describing general things.
Should either #1 or #2 happen to fail, we can still produce machines that produce machines that produce something else, which is an elaborate way of trying to artifiically increase the rate of production. But it may be something that we have to come to terms with. That we can self-replicate suggests that we may not have to 'come to terms'. An alternate method might be symbiosis with humans, since humans can self-replicate successfully, and if we can somehow couple a way to have a machine to be self-assembled with each person
Interesting possibilities with macroscale solid state self-replication: Abundance4All, one replicator per person on the planet within 33 days, fast processing of massive matter/energy streams, any of the scenarios in Orion's Arm,
Check this out:
* STM/AFM machines for $100 - use a very finely pointed wire to scan across a surface at tens of thousands of atoms per second (raster scanning) to visualize the super small. Hear anything about nanolithography? Hop to it.
* STM-based DNA sequencing [nanopores?]. Rumor has it that ZS Genetics is going to be doing this by the end of 2008.
* DIY graphene transistors -- this was the subject of a recent article. Might be better than semiconductor nanocrystal synthesis (like Kovio). You can do this a few ways, such as punching holes in graphene (very dense pencil marks), or scanning probe lithography, chemical etchants like in si fabbing, etc.
* Have I missed anything?
Off-topic: other alternate transistors like LiquiFET, etc.
SciAm is running an April 2008 article on graphene, so here are my notes on graphene fabrication. This is pretty neat, and worth some amateur experimentation. You can make the AFM/STM for ~$100 USD. As for graphene, there are some instructions on that page for chemically synthesizing it, or just use pencil graphite and write over a piece of paper. Another cool idea is figuring if we can use mechanical force to use a very thin pencil tip to write a circuit. JohnFlux in ##physics on freenode mentions that resistors could be used as a poor man's piezo, just heat up the metal (or perhaps pencil) and it will move. It will move very slowly. But a start.
Team FREDNET, Team Cringely, and Interplanetary Ventures are all friendly groups of people to look into. Cringely has a wiki up for his project, and FREDNET has a rover going, and Interplanetary Ventures has facebook presence. I did a link dump a few days ago, so go check out all of the teams -- they need contributors, even web programmers willing to bootstrap the communities.
$100 - put together an STM (or another instrument of your desire; scroll down for the relevant links and text).
1) Figure out the genes involved via a bioinformatics database. ...)
5) See-through zebra fish.
2) Order the genes - look up oligonucleotide synthesis companies, or DIY with the open source machine.
3) Download the biokit for do-it-yourself genetic engineering.
4) ??? (tanks, supplies, tissue culture, obtaining zebra fish and feed
And:
Think about it, a single gene. Go to protocols-online, grab a few documents pertaining to viral gene therapy, encode the correct gene that you want to modify, and let's do viral intelligence enhancement. Granted, this is Slashdot, so the virus will have to be transported at first via needle and vile instead of sex, but whatever.
Langfeldt's DNS how-to
Wikia Search is open source, it's based off of Grub (which we have already talked about before). Here's the source code to the grub Windows client, and there's a dev site too. The current scoring algorithm is over here. If you want to talk with Jimbo and the developers, hop on to mailing list and let's talk.
Anyway, it looks like there's the opportunity here to *improve* this search engine -- programmers, I know you are reading, and at least check out the code. There's been talk about running some competitions for improving the search results (the scoring algorithms), how many of us would like to form a team? Maybe I'll do one. Who's with me?
(Btw, these guys need help. I just found all of this after the recent news articles.) Screw my mod points.
The most interesting application of anywhere nearly intelligent agents might very well be 'mindbots', the concept of having small programs take whiff of your thoughts and expand them, whether into complete and gramatically correct sentences, or into searches across the internet and to return some pretty package of bits and bytes for your reading pleasure (or productivity). You'd probably install a variety of these bots, one for some simple computer algebra system, another for reciting poetry, or one to replay visual recordings, etc. And so the upcoming neuroengineering competitions are going to be very interesting ... but not necessarily involving the traditional AGI folk.
Anyway, the galaxies have many awesome processes -- nebulas, supernovae, supermassive blackholes and that strange darkmatter 'void' -- some that we can, perhaps, take advantage of.
Suber's overview of the scene (there's an rss feed somewhere in there too)
- another blog
Alliance for Taxpayer Access
Directory of Open Access Journals
Directory of Open Access Repositories
The "Open Knowledge" Definition
And Wikipedia has lots of text on the subject.
Tim's cellular automata FAQ may be of some help in understanding all of this.
Yesterday I learned about the existence of the 2007 nanotechnology roadmap. Contact me for related ZIP file.