Research seldom goes where it is supposed to. I can see the first stage of this investigation might be to find out if our bodies have natural clocks that cause the system to shut down at a certain age, and try to turn them off, or even put the clock back so we can repair damage as babies can regrow fingers. We have the advantage over natural living systems so we can work co-operatively to fight disease and repair damage.
If we are using this advantage, then long life will most likely be achieved by a continuous process where our bodies are upgraded and repaired rather than a once-off immortality jab of 1950's science fiction. This can take us in many directions, from the vision of untroubled long life, to an existence like the Struldbrugs in Gulliver's travels.
Before we go too far down this road, do you have criteria for what sorts of longevity are acceptable and what are not, or do we play it as it comes?
Why settle for a piddling 30 meters? Saturn's rings have a certain zone-plate like flavour to them. With a few artificial shepherd moons to tweak the periodic intervals, weought to get some sort of an interference pattern. The focal length will be huge so the rings don't have to be flat...
Actually, this is pretty silly, but it might be possible to make a partially self-assembling zone plate out of a massive central body and a carefully seeded orbiting cloud of black dust, edge-on to the sun. You might be able to get a refractive zone plate using orbiting gas, but you would have to control the optical retardation, where black is just black and if it is black in the right places, then it might work.
"Yet despite this humble appearance, it took 20 to 30 years to develop, at a cost of tens of millions of pounds."
Divide tens of millions of pounds by 20-30 years, and you get an annual cost of some UK engineers and their equipment. Unless, of course the figures aren't right, but I have a feeling that they are not too far out.
I say, dash it all, buck it up you fellows! I know chaps in the RFC who are just itching to slap a couple of ion drives on their kites, what?
This is not really about patents, but two companies having a scrap and using whatever tools come to hand. However, it does give some insights into the wonderful and wacky world of US patent law.
The internaltional patent treaties require symmetrical rights across internaltional boundaries for the signatories, even though the patent laws of the signatories may not be the same. If a patent can cover something in country A, and cannot in country B, then within country B there is no infringement of that which cannot be patented.
In Europe, for example, we cannot patent business practices, and software patents are being challenged. We canot patent either of these, which also means we cannot apply for a US patent even though the US patent would be valid.
Consequently, an infringement of a US patent has to be found on US soil. Once a case has been found, then the lawysers can ask for (and get) damages that include losses of sales abroad. But without an infringement on US soil, the game doesn't start.
If the Boeing patent was properly worded, then infringement would cover building a craft that could do the patented process, or issuing instructions for the patented process. As the craft was not designed to do this, then SES Americom might get around this by having someone in Europe issue the signals.
Unfortunately, in such cases, neither side in a patent case is likely to get their costs back, so it is often easier to roll over then fight, particularly when one company is smaller than another.
It is tempting to scale up the Apollo program when looking at Mars. However, the concept of a single multistage rocket is perhaps not the way to go.
If Mars goes around the sun in about 2 earth years, then there is an elliptical orbit that is tangential to mars and earth that will represent the minimum energy routes to Mars. The trip would take somewhere between half an earth year and half a Martian year - let's say about 8-10 months. You could get to Mars faster if you kept your foot to the floor, but that would waste a lot of fuel. So - this route is not far from the optimum route you might take even if you had ion engines, provided our two planets were in the right place.
The craft has got to be big. It has to have room enough to live in for a year or so, with backup. You could strap some enormous chemical rocket that was shipped into space. However, suppose you launched the thing without anyone inside. It can sit in space for years. It could be slowly be raised in orbit using earth-moon tidal forces with ion engine pumping, and a final slinghot. Having escaped the earth-moon system it could slowly accelerate using ion engines or solar sails to get towards Mars. It would take a quick slingshot or aerobrake around Mars and head back towards Earth. If it is in the right orbit, it could get back to Earth without any propulsion, and have enough velocity to get back to Mars' orbit again. Now it is going nice and fast, our passengeers can get on. This time, we are not accelerating the whole living environment, but just the people and their hand luggage to get them to the rendevous, and a conventional rocket might do for that.
Once we have got this far, we then have a big, habitable volume going between Earth's orbit and Mars' orbit. With a bit of fine tuning, we can probably arrange for it to pas Mars and Earth again. This means if we can generate fuel on Mars for a lifting body to get people to rendevous with the big craft, then going back is not only possible, it is almost free, particularly if you are taking a relief crew out.
Do you remember the bit in "The Right Stuff" where someone proposed and volunteered to go to the moon in the hope that they could be resupplied until a vehicle for the return journey could be built? They didn't do it then. I guess we won't do it now. It is interesting to wonder why we would go through huge expense to return one person when we have so many, and the same money would save more lives in other ways. However, we won't do it if we don't have to, and I don't think we do.
Yep: they tell us you can be in charge, but only if you conform and obey. And the person who is above you - he (yep, it is more likely to be a he) got there by conforming and obeying. And all they way up the chain the same rules apply. Except, the geek wonders, what happens at the top? Reduction ad absurdam, guys - who does the top person obey and conform to? Lord Xenu? Some Darth Vader guy who allows himself alone to wear the cool black cape, and everyone else has to wear the regulation grey? Som being of pure energy that is unable to support a tie, and yet can insist on it on others?
Actually, no. I have seen clothing standards spontaneously appear. A clean room was set up. The people who worked in it got to chose the colour of their clean room gowns and shoes. Noboday wanted the white. The people who worked in there went for the light blue. People like me who had occasional buisness there, and needed to use the electron microscope used the deep blue ones. We had white ones for visitors. After about a month, I found I was getting ticked off for wearing the wrong colour gown, even though the gowns didn't actually belong to anybody in particular.
The Scientific Civil Serivce in the UK used to start at jacket and tie, then go to light suits (meaning you didn't do anything too messy or chemical, and could go double jeopardy with matching trousers and jacket. The further up you went, the darker the suit got. However, I could not go and get a perfectly black suit and become King - the system enforced the dress, not the other way around. In the Foreign office things were the other way around - going from dark suites, via light suits, to jacket and trousers, perhaps implying you spent your time in Jakarta, Bejing, Hawaii, and Bongo-Bongo-land, and you are only popping through London. I bet the Queen would rather wear almost anything on her head other than the Regulation Shiny Hat that her office requires for one or two state occasions.
The ancient Romans thought the toga was silly and impractical, but it was traditional, and it was status. The tale of the 47 Ronin was all started by someone being advised to wear the wrong colour of trousers at court. Year yellow stockings cross-gartered at the knee, and you were a fool in Shakespere's day. Come the Revolution, we shall all be wearing Mao suits. if the fashionistas say silly long middle-ages shoes, or ruffs, or bustles, you jump, or you fall behind. Is there truly no escape?
Let me qualify that last cry: is there no escape, that also allows us power, influence, and a decent wage?
Here is a more familiar example. Try writing something large on a blackboard. Try writing something tiny. Your hadwriting style is probably recognizeable. However, you are probably using different muscles in each. When writing scles. When writing very large you may be using your arm and shoulder muscles too. When writing small, you may be using your fingertip muscles - perhaps holding the tool very tightly and using the balances of strains in the fingertips to move the tool. Nevertheless, it seems we have some learned kinematics, which we can rapidly map from one set of muscles to another, in a way we can't when trying to walk on our hands.
The example of 'feeling the pressure at the tip of the pencil' is not wrong, but most people when asked will claim they know they are pressing on the pencil all the time. Then again. most people will claim they are in concious control of their body. It is sometimes a bit of a shock to discover that different parts are doing complex stuff 'by themselves'.
I agree: there is a lot of hysteria here, and not a lot of cause for it. The more panicky of you can find a paper bag and breath into it, while I talk slowly and calmly about something familiar, like toast, maybe, until your heart rate comes down a bit.
To the outsider, the world of patents may seem utterly without reason. However, as patents are supposed to cover things that haven't existed until now, there are always problems as the patent laws meet something new. There was a famous fuss back in about 1857 (?) when someone patented putting a rubber at the end of a pencil - both rubber and pencil existed: was putting the two together obvious? If it wasn't obvious, why wasn't anyone doing it?
Right now, we have several such struggles gong on at once. The whole issue of computer program patentability is a bit clearer than the issue of business models or games: there is clear prior art. Any Turing complete system has been known to be capable of performing any calculation that can be performed. So you are going to have to patent a computer plus something. An Europe (and, patentwise, the UK is in Europe, here) the program is not patentable in itself, so we are gong to have to add something physical.
Okay - on to toast. The first bit always comes out too light. If you twiddle the knobs, the second bit comes out too dark. If you fill both slots, it may be different. Say - you could stick a computer in there. It would know whether you have put in one slice or two, and whether this is the first slice of the day. It could learn what corrections it needs to apply to these special states from whether you pop it up early, or push it down again. It could even estimate the albedo of the toast from the resistence, and hence the temperature of the filament. Nice toast for everyone, and a patent for me, yay!
Okay, now I want to protect my mighty toaster empire against the circling, predatory rivals, so I have to tighten up my patent. A toaster with a computer is patentable, just like a rubber on a pencil, but the toaster and the computer aren't. A toaster with a USB output so you can control it from a computer might be patentable, so you have to add that as a claim in your patent. A toaster with a general purpose computer that can also be used for checking your toast is OK too. An unprogrammed toaster computer that picks up the latest software from a website would be okay as well, so you stick in extra claims for these. A hear-resistant computer designed to interface with toasters might be patentable too, provided you can point to some innovation.
This is not a completely silly example. Xerox had patents covering the photocopier. Canon patented a photocopier with a computer between the scanner and the recorder at a time where real-time image processing on whole pages seemed absurd. This was worth a huge amount of money as they could make photocopiers, and laser printers.
You can perhaps see why we got here. To protect my idea, I have to consider all the possibilities where the computer is not in the toaster, the program isn't in the computer, the toaster fits into a slot in your computer, the program is in the package but not loaded in the toaster, the computer is next to a conventional toaster and turning its controls, and so on. The more toaster I cut away, the more it looks like a software patent. There is no risk for sticking in extra dependent claims, so in they all go, and it is up to a judge to determine the exact point where the toaster disappeared.
If you have a glib patent agent, they might persuade a judge that there is still some toaster left, when there really isn't. These things happen. Doesn't change the law, though.
Gaming has often outstripped other computing activities. If there are insights to be had, then that is where I would look.
You often cannot apprieciate the qualities of a good mae - they just seem to work because the good design has become invisible. So, let's think of bad games. These suffer from two sorts of frustrations: being too straightforward (you need 50 wolf skins to buy a sword) or too hard (you have been eaten by a grue). A good game slowly ramps up the challenges as your skills develop, so there is always the right amount of challenge.
Now consider patent research. I have done a fair bit of this for my own patents, and to attack others. There are patent databases. You can easily easch these by keyword. However, this only gives you the patents that can be found where you expect to find them. If you have an opponent, then they will be able to find these. The real paydirt often lies where you don't expect to find it. Sometimes you can find other words, or look though everything in an encouraging patent class of the right age. But this is hard and slow: nothing like your original datagasm with five good hits in the top 20. Then you suspect that the real stuff you are looking for isn't in patent databases at all. You Google the history of the subject, and maybe you find a forgotten branch of technology, and you are zooming along again. Sometimes, what you are looking for is too old to be digitized, so you have to get yourself to a paper library, and start again.
Here is a real example. I got quite excited about the possibility of making a CRT without a shadow mask. It is not hard to hit a target the size of a bit of phosphor with an electron beam by dead reckonong. Electron microscopes do it all the time. If you collect the secondary electrons, then you ought to be able to 'see' the phosphor dots like a scanning electron microscope does. A quick computer search showed up nothing. A quick expeiment with a scanning electron microscope, and a bit of screen separated from an old TV with a lump hammer showed it might work. I went to a library to do some research - and there I found a book from 1960 "Modern Television Technology": this had a pile of completely forgotten ideas from the days when RCA had a complete grip on colour television technology, and other people were prepared to try anything to get an alternative. There was even some guy that was desparate enough to try and pick up the soft X-rays within the tube, even though he could only detect one or two per line. And there was my idea, and it was called 'beam indexing'. Beam indexing? I tried the computer on that, and sure enough, it - 'it' was probably Alta Vista back then - knew all about the Zebra tube, the Apple tube (not that apple), and all sorts of other stuff.
So, what do I see? When I search, I have long periods of unrewarding work. I would give up, but often it is important, and I get results by being a bit more autistic than some others. Then we get a new lead, and excitement flares up again. Then it goes all dull. Perhaps the problem (if it is a problem) with Google is that the datagasm flood of leads burns out so quickly, and the drugery of a genuine search where people haven't been before you seems that mich duller by contrast. I hope that more abstract search tools with richer interfaces - things like the citations index that can display networks of related bits of data as graphs - will allow people to go smoothly from the basic search of indexed data to the mining of the less known stuff, and then to the unindexed, and then to the undigitized. And, as you go, your trail can be used to lead others.
> I suspect too that you may be trolling, because you must know that for any medium sized or above projects, European competition law is very strict. The UK Government is not allowed to prefer local suppliers.
I worked for the MoD, but a while ago now. It was very difficult to get equipment from non-UK suppliers if a UK supplier existed, with one or two strange exceptions. HP somehow got recognized as 'reliable' so you could ask for HP computers or calculators. porobably one of the Men in Suits, who did the Civil Service exam, and got on the 'fast track' got given a free calculator once...
Cork has a negative Poisson's ratio. The cells have the same 'Bow tie' shape. I want to make a corkscrew with a tightening screw thread. This should compress the cork, making it narrower, so it comes out more easily.
Use cork! People are stopping using corks in bottles, and so the Portugese are grubbing up gork groves thousands of years old, and getting EEC grants to plant yuckky stuff like oilseed rape instead. If you can find a neat use for the stuff, you would be saving a bit of history too.
This is not just a moan - it is a serious question.
In the UK, every large computer project since the Navy sponsored the Babbige engine seems to end up running hugely over budget and time, and often delivering nothing. Often, many of these projects could have been done on standard equipment from the high street shop. Remember the 10 lb military wearable computer and radio that did little more than a mobile phone? The recent leak of disks with 25 million UYK residents' personal information, most of which was not wanted by the people it was going to was not removed because that was 'too labour intensive'. A few lines of perl, tops. If they want to send discs, then can send discs of random numbers, and do one-time pad encryption. If you have a proper source of random numbers, then provided the discs arrive with the seals intact, they can send the actual data XORed with the one-time pad. Not exactly rocket science, any of this.
The usual explanation is a lack of market forces. State projects tend to get offered to contractors with vetted personnel, contractors who have done similar projects before. If you have a military requirement then your choice is restriced to positively vetted people who don't mind working on such stuff. Certainly, in the UK, there seems to be a cosy relationship between the state and the contractors. I am not sure I altogether buy this explanation. If there really is a free market, then more talented people ought eventually to come to the top if the contracts are so lucrative,
Perhaps the problem lies with the national interest. The UK government would have to prever UK companies to overseas ones. Sometimes the competition has to come from outside a country. 20 years ago, prescription glasses used to be expensive and took a week to arrive. If you were going to the US, you could take your prescription, and get a pair made in an hour. Now you can get the same service in the UK. In the US, it is hard to get a mobile phone unlocked - it is looked on as illegal, but in the UK this is commonplace. IN both cases, I don't think there was anyhing that was actively preventing competition: it just wasn't happening.
Yes. It's all about low dose versus high dose. I ised to have a bit to do with this buisness, and the statistics sort of go like this...
Suppose a single radioactive decay had a 1/P probability of giving you lukaemia. If you had two decays, then this might give you 1/P from the first particule, plus (1-P)/P chance of missing the first particle but being got by the second one. If P is small then (1-P) is virtually 1.0, and you have about double the chance. So you have about double the change with double the dose.
However, consider ordinary black-and white film. Each grain requires about 5 points of damage in the crystal structure before the crystal can be reduced by the developer. If your exposure probablility is P, then the chance of getting a dose of 5 or more wouold be P*P*P*P*P. The exposure would go as the fifth power of the light level. If P becomes large, then we cannot approximate (1-P) to 1.0 any longer. Put a bit fancier, you are going from Poisson statistics to a normal distribution.
In the simple film example, we have argued that the probably if a grain being developable goes as the fifth power of the light level for low doses. We can argue for models where you need N separate absorbtions to create the critical level of damage, and the probabliliy of critical damage will go as the Nth power for very low doses. The most pessimistic model is for N=1, where a single particule does the job, and the probability goes down linearly. We can't come up with a sensible argument for using only half a particle, and the damage going as the square root of the dose, so linear is the most pessimistic model. There are models where we assume we can continuously repair a certain low level of damage, and when we exceed that level, then the incedence may locally rise faster than the liner model. However, the whole curve will lie under the linear model if we assume we do not repair ourselves at all.
Normally, we do not do experiments on large numers of people to work out how dangerous radiation is. Where we have accidents, we try and reconstruct the doses people had, and extrapolate from the high dose figures to low doses. When we do this, we usually assume the linear model, because that is the most pessimistic one. We then can try to see if the theory holds by looking at lower-level doses - like people who live on granite, or take a lot of aircraft fights, or have been x-rayed. If we were badly out in our original assumptions, then we ought to be able to detect a significant increase in leukaemia incedence in airline pilots, or people from Cornwall. If we don't see anything significant, then we gues that the linear model was perhaps too pessimistic, but we do not have any indication by how much. If the real relationship is the square or the cube, then the low dose statistics may be tiny. However, we cannot safely assume that, and we don't.
We would hope to have a large difference between the worst case for the calculated risks and the actual effects on large populations at low doses. The only way we can know for certain is by giving a lot of people a known low dose of radiation, and we don't want to do that. Things are as they should be.
Part of the Storm threat is that it is able to intimidate those who stand up to it, or attempt to combat it. This would suggest that Storm is in turn vulnerable to an attack by an even bigger botnet. It can succeed on poorly protected machines and lurk in the many dark corners of the Internet, like cockroaches. Suppose enough of us willingly subscribed the spare cycles in our machines to serve as a botnet that would fight the others? Could that work?
Can we come up with a working definition of 'good' for such a botnet? I would not subscribe my machine to any government directed search for terrorists, for example (that's probably got me on a no-fly list). However, it should be possible to confine our botnet to the named botnets in the article, and do 'good' in an sense that would be acceptable to most users. If the project veers towards evil, then there must always be a way to unsubscribe.
Then, we want a fancy UI like the SETI screensaver, so we can see how we are doing, and root for our side.
I thought helium came up with Texas oil. Not all oil, but US oil was particularly rich in it. In the 1930's the US did not like exporting the stuff as you could fill zeppelins with it. That's why the British filled the R101, and the Germans filled the Hindenberg with hydrogen. In the UK, we used to collect all the helium we could from low-termperature experiments, stuff it into cylinders, and send it back for re-liquefaction. In the US, they just let it boil away at the time.
At the time, I was told that something like 1/3 of the helium in known oil reserves has gone, and that was 20 years ago. Probably there is more in sand, and other places, but it will cost more to get out. I saw the picture of the balloon and thought that was a lot of helium we won't be seeing again. You could re-compress the helium to make the balloon descend, but I expect a lot will have diffused through the skin. It does that. That's why rubber helium balloons go flat.
Actually, now we know more about electrical safety, and not to paint our zepplins in thermite, hydrogen is a lot less scary. I am not sure how greenhouse-ish it is as I expect it keeps on rising like helium. But you can always burn it when it vents.
UK factories often had a public address system - often called the 'Tannoy' - from the maker's name on the speaker grilles. These systems were often used to broadcast the Light Programme (National Radio) and later Radio 1 (ditto). This was in the days before private radio stations in the UK. Nor being widespread does not necessarily make something legal in the K (viz. the Speed Limit), but the fact that the BBC made programmes for re-broadcast within factories for years since WWII without this fuss ought to count for something.
Prior art for compressing twenty years' of meditiation into seconds using electronic cranial stimulation, to guarantee oneness with the divine and entry in to heaven...
Anyhow, I know the feeling. As the adrenaline wears off, the self-righteousness kicks in, and you want to get even. Gosh, this must be how Replublicans must feel all the time, wow! And then, all these dull slashdotters say you can get another one off the insurance, and serves you right for not blacking up your data, and so on, boo hiss. The only practical suggestion involved Linus Torvalds' laptop, and I am not sure how practical that actually was.
Though the police may not find it economic to to much about an isolated theft, it ought to be possible for a specialist company to make a profit out of snitting missing machines on the web. We are not trying to outwit the Master Brain, just the sort of person who can't keep their hands of other peoples shiny things. A lot of the tracing could be done without leaving the office, so you don't have to be Robocop. If they worked on a 'no trace no fee' basis then it would be hard to see how they could rip people off, unlike some of the 'security' services mentioned in the other post that needed you to register upfront. The RIAA spends it's time hunting down data that has no recovery value whatever, and they turn in a profit.
I am no big fan of capitalism, but this is the sort of thig it ought to be best at.
This is an old one. Well, no it isn't. However, if you attempted to define what life is, it does tend to qualify. It can move, it can 'eat' and 'breathe'. It can die. It can reproduce. You don't need intelligence for life. Life is complicated in a way that flames are not. Our assumptions of life seem to require the propagation of a complicated structure. Crystals can 'grow' but they have a long repitition of a simple structure. Planets can 'grow' or accrete, but there is no structure as such.
What is proposed here is that we can assemble molecules based on what we have learned from natural mechanisms, and these molecules ought to be able to reproduce themselves, given the correct environment. The correct environment, here, is probably sterile to avoid Real Life (tm) from contaminating it or (more probably) eating it. Scientifically, it will be an important demonstration. Maybe, like when urea was first synthesized, it will show clearly to people outside science that the border between life and chemistry is not as sharp and total as some people would have us believe. And, maybe, we can use them to make other complicated chemicals for the pharma industry. It isn't designer babies or giant dinosaurs designed to fight on after a nuclear war, or stuff like that - just a few chemicals doing their thing in a sealed tube.
It is tempting to believe that once we have made soemthing, then breeding and natural selection will cause our new biology to boot itself. I do not really believe this myself. Most self-learning or self-training in computer programming needs careful guidance before it can be useful. Most random changes kill, Nevertheless, such an experiments would set some bounds on how likely spontaneous evolution is. That, in turn, might set bounds on how likely life like ours is on other planets.
Okay, it is not nearly as cool as going to other planets, but it is a lot cheaper.
The BBC is a monopoly with unique rights to collect licence fees from UK citizens for owning a television set, and the state picks up the licence collection costs. This mad state of affairs is supposed to keep the BBC independent of political interference: to some extent it actually does too, hooray. In some places where logic has a firmer grip, it would be hard to argue that an institution that gets its income by fiat has the moral highground over a collection of ISP companies that have to make a living. Here, in a country where the head of the state is also head of the national religion, we can take this sort of thing in our stride.
However, many of us here who may not give two hoots for the Royal Family or God in any form cherish the BBC. It is a beloved organization - part of the national psyche along with Hornby railway sets, Meccano, Lord Reith, Flanders and Swan, the Home Service, Wimbledon, Airfix, Old English Spangles, Aertex, Proper Sausages with breadcrumbs in, and the Promenade Concerts. In many ways it is not perfect, but we see it for the aspiration that it embodies as much as what it now is, nation shall speak peace unto nation, and all that sort of thing. It sets the standard that our other TV channels have to match or not get watched. It has chosen to set a standard for web pages too, and though that is not part of its charter, it seems right that it does.
Listen well, IPS's. We like our BBC. You touch it, you touch us. Beware.
Yep. They need to cooperate with the silicon chip makers. And that's the really interesting bit...
Carbon can be a superresistor, a resistor, a semiconductor, or a conductor just by itself. The big, conjugated pi electron clouds you get above and below a graphite layer have lots of electrons in a single ground energy state, much like superconductivity. There are hopes that you can get some reduced dimension superconduction in carbon if you an up the electron density a bit. You may get this inside a buckytube where the curvature gives more electrons per unit volume.electron cloud is You could do this by rolling up a graphene into a buckytube. Then carbon could do the lot, electrically.
Fine. Carbon is clever stuff. However, we have spent a huge amount of time and effort on silicon. It is one small step on the periodic table, but one great leap for mankind. When we solder a device to a circuit board, there is a whole technology involved in getting from the submicron geometries and tiny singnals to the submillimeter sizes and microamp currents for things we can physically handle. We are going to need a new technology to go from the microscale of silicon to the nanoscale, quantum world of silicon. This could be thirty years of pouring research into new techniques before we ever get a useful device.
If, however, someone can come up with some way of using carbon on silicon, then we may be able to start working on practical carbon fabrication techniques and make them pay under much shorter timescales. I had always imagined the first application of carbon as some memory unit as memory usually involves banging out billions of copies of the same simple element, so the development costs in designing a single element are allowed to go higher than elsewhere. However, here is another option: we can deposit carbon onto an existing silicon surface - not as genuine epitaxy, but just using it as a flat surface, the way copper currently does. The next trick might be to get the film to roll itself into a buckytube. We have got the connections from silicon to carbon, and just the beginnings of practical self-assembly.
Early in the last century, people used to believe the nucleus was a loose 'plum pudding' of protons and neutrons that the electrons orgbited through as well as around. Rutherford was astonished when he got beta particles (helium nucleii) bouncing back from some tiny, hard central nucleus.
What is the problem with a small nucleus? Well, if you believed in point charges then you would have light electrons orbiting a heavy nucleus like a small solar system. With a simple hydrogen atom, you would have a proton and an electron as a rotating dipole. With classical electrodynamics, this ought to radiate waves with the frequency of the orbit, and the electron should spiral into the nucleus, with the frequency rising as it goes. The pair of particules is not losing angular momentum, so it should get faster and faster untill some new force - perhaps the actual 'size' of the nucleus, stops it, or it collapses forever. We know this does not happen - there is no 'ultraviolet catastrophe', and the electron can radiate only a few discrete wavelengths, rather than a continuous, rising chirp. And thank goodness this is so, because the universe would be a very dull place, though we would not be around to complain about it.
We now have quantum electrodynamics, which predicts what these particles do very nicely and to enormous precision. Many people find QED unsatisfactory because it seems to involve switching between looking at things as particules and as waves apparently at random, and it seems to need some faster than light magic to make it work, though we can never catch the universe doing it. Many popular science articles love dwelling on this 'mystic' aspect', but it doesn't help. Basically (a) small things are not like big things, and (b) the equations work, so we trust them in as far as scientists trust anything.
With QED we can imagine what happens when we overcome the weak nuclear forces. We get neutron stars, where everything goes to one big squash of condensed matter. With black holes, we are squishing even harder, and then gravity (an inverse square force like electrostatic attraction) ought to run away, and all the particules ought to radiate gravitational waves and vanish towards a dimensionless dot. Only it can't do because there are other things like the angular momentum which must be preserved but cannot exist at a dot (okay, there are ways around this), and the entropy of the original particles, which ought to still be preserved somehow. Sound familiar? Yes - if we allow the particules to fall inwards forever then we get a paradox. Probably something else happens. What? We don't know.
The logical place to look is something like string theory. If you look closely enough, particles may not be dots but lines or surfaces or all sorts of things. Nice idea, but not much help unless it actually predicts something.
We think we can see black holes. We may know from observation about as much about the insides of black holes as was known about the structure of the nucleus back in 1920. Ask again in ninety years or so.
Even old-style phones had patent issues. To make a phone you had to have a good speaker, and a good microphone. The Bell system used a moving coil microphone. They couldn't use the carbon microphone, which was more compact and did not require amplification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_microphone) because it had been patented separately by Edison and Berliner. Edison wanted to have his own telephone, but his own speaker (involving chalk soaked in electrolyte, and an electric motor) was so outlandish that it never went commercial.
Somehow, they must have got over the deadlock, as carbon microphones were standard when I was young. You may still see people banging the handset to stop crackling - this could re-pack the carbon granules in the microphone, but doesn't do anything these days.
The other thing we need to do is to scale the human or post-human lifetime.
You would not readily volunteer to spend half of (say) an 80-year lifetime in going to the stars. You ought not to be able to volunteer the lives of your children and your children's children to some colonization programme. However, expand the human lifetime to a thousand years, and the loss of a fraction of your life may seem acceptable. Add the option of suspended animation and the experience may become tolerable. If you decide to breed at the far end, you can do so. If your children don't like it there, they can take the next 80-year bus back.
Slashdot Mirror
Research seldom goes where it is supposed to. I can see the first stage of this investigation might be to find out if our bodies have natural clocks that cause the system to shut down at a certain age, and try to turn them off, or even put the clock back so we can repair damage as babies can regrow fingers. We have the advantage over natural living systems so we can work co-operatively to fight disease and repair damage.
If we are using this advantage, then long life will most likely be achieved by a continuous process where our bodies are upgraded and repaired rather than a once-off immortality jab of 1950's science fiction. This can take us in many directions, from the vision of untroubled long life, to an existence like the Struldbrugs in Gulliver's travels.
Before we go too far down this road, do you have criteria for what sorts of longevity are acceptable and what are not, or do we play it as it comes?
Why settle for a piddling 30 meters? Saturn's rings have a certain zone-plate like flavour to them. With a few artificial shepherd moons to tweak the periodic intervals, weought to get some sort of an interference pattern. The focal length will be huge so the rings don't have to be flat...
Actually, this is pretty silly, but it might be possible to make a partially self-assembling zone plate out of a massive central body and a carefully seeded orbiting cloud of black dust, edge-on to the sun. You might be able to get a refractive zone plate using orbiting gas, but you would have to control the optical retardation, where black is just black and if it is black in the right places, then it might work.
For another fun sort of lens, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneberg_lens
"Yet despite this humble appearance, it took 20 to 30 years to develop, at a cost of tens of millions of pounds."
Divide tens of millions of pounds by 20-30 years, and you get an annual cost of some UK engineers and their equipment. Unless, of course the figures aren't right, but I have a feeling that they are not too far out.
I say, dash it all, buck it up you fellows! I know chaps in the RFC who are just itching to slap a couple of ion drives on their kites, what?
This is not really about patents, but two companies having a scrap and using whatever tools come to hand. However, it does give some insights into the wonderful and wacky world of US patent law.
The internaltional patent treaties require symmetrical rights across internaltional boundaries for the signatories, even though the patent laws of the signatories may not be the same. If a patent can cover something in country A, and cannot in country B, then within country B there is no infringement of that which cannot be patented.
In Europe, for example, we cannot patent business practices, and software patents are being challenged. We canot patent either of these, which also means we cannot apply for a US patent even though the US patent would be valid.
Consequently, an infringement of a US patent has to be found on US soil. Once a case has been found, then the lawysers can ask for (and get) damages that include losses of sales abroad. But without an infringement on US soil, the game doesn't start.
If the Boeing patent was properly worded, then infringement would cover building a craft that could do the patented process, or issuing instructions for the patented process. As the craft was not designed to do this, then SES Americom might get around this by having someone in Europe issue the signals.
Unfortunately, in such cases, neither side in a patent case is likely to get their costs back, so it is often easier to roll over then fight, particularly when one company is smaller than another.
It is tempting to scale up the Apollo program when looking at Mars. However, the concept of a single multistage rocket is perhaps not the way to go.
If Mars goes around the sun in about 2 earth years, then there is an elliptical orbit that is tangential to mars and earth that will represent the minimum energy routes to Mars. The trip would take somewhere between half an earth year and half a Martian year - let's say about 8-10 months. You could get to Mars faster if you kept your foot to the floor, but that would waste a lot of fuel. So - this route is not far from the optimum route you might take even if you had ion engines, provided our two planets were in the right place.
The craft has got to be big. It has to have room enough to live in for a year or so, with backup. You could strap some enormous chemical rocket that was shipped into space. However, suppose you launched the thing without anyone inside. It can sit in space for years. It could be slowly be raised in orbit using earth-moon tidal forces with ion engine pumping, and a final slinghot. Having escaped the earth-moon system it could slowly accelerate using ion engines or solar sails to get towards Mars. It would take a quick slingshot or aerobrake around Mars and head back towards Earth. If it is in the right orbit, it could get back to Earth without any propulsion, and have enough velocity to get back to Mars' orbit again. Now it is going nice and fast, our passengeers can get on. This time, we are not accelerating the whole living environment, but just the people and their hand luggage to get them to the rendevous, and a conventional rocket might do for that.
Once we have got this far, we then have a big, habitable volume going between Earth's orbit and Mars' orbit. With a bit of fine tuning, we can probably arrange for it to pas Mars and Earth again. This means if we can generate fuel on Mars for a lifting body to get people to rendevous with the big craft, then going back is not only possible, it is almost free, particularly if you are taking a relief crew out.
Do you remember the bit in "The Right Stuff" where someone proposed and volunteered to go to the moon in the hope that they could be resupplied until a vehicle for the return journey could be built? They didn't do it then. I guess we won't do it now. It is interesting to wonder why we would go through huge expense to return one person when we have so many, and the same money would save more lives in other ways. However, we won't do it if we don't have to, and I don't think we do.
Yep: they tell us you can be in charge, but only if you conform and obey. And the person who is above you - he (yep, it is more likely to be a he) got there by conforming and obeying. And all they way up the chain the same rules apply. Except, the geek wonders, what happens at the top? Reduction ad absurdam, guys - who does the top person obey and conform to? Lord Xenu? Some Darth Vader guy who allows himself alone to wear the cool black cape, and everyone else has to wear the regulation grey? Som being of pure energy that is unable to support a tie, and yet can insist on it on others?
Actually, no. I have seen clothing standards spontaneously appear. A clean room was set up. The people who worked in it got to chose the colour of their clean room gowns and shoes. Noboday wanted the white. The people who worked in there went for the light blue. People like me who had occasional buisness there, and needed to use the electron microscope used the deep blue ones. We had white ones for visitors. After about a month, I found I was getting ticked off for wearing the wrong colour gown, even though the gowns didn't actually belong to anybody in particular.
The Scientific Civil Serivce in the UK used to start at jacket and tie, then go to light suits (meaning you didn't do anything too messy or chemical, and could go double jeopardy with matching trousers and jacket. The further up you went, the darker the suit got. However, I could not go and get a perfectly black suit and become King - the system enforced the dress, not the other way around. In the Foreign office things were the other way around - going from dark suites, via light suits, to jacket and trousers, perhaps implying you spent your time in Jakarta, Bejing, Hawaii, and Bongo-Bongo-land, and you are only popping through London. I bet the Queen would rather wear almost anything on her head other than the Regulation Shiny Hat that her office requires for one or two state occasions.
The ancient Romans thought the toga was silly and impractical, but it was traditional, and it was status. The tale of the 47 Ronin was all started by someone being advised to wear the wrong colour of trousers at court. Year yellow stockings cross-gartered at the knee, and you were a fool in Shakespere's day. Come the Revolution, we shall all be wearing Mao suits. if the fashionistas say silly long middle-ages shoes, or ruffs, or bustles, you jump, or you fall behind. Is there truly no escape?
Let me qualify that last cry: is there no escape, that also allows us power, influence, and a decent wage?
The Society for Patent Enforcement, Copyright, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion was expecting a considerably larger figure...
(strokes cat)
Goodbye, Mister Bond.
Here is a more familiar example. Try writing something large on a blackboard. Try writing something tiny. Your hadwriting style is probably recognizeable. However, you are probably using different muscles in each. When writing scles. When writing very large you may be using your arm and shoulder muscles too. When writing small, you may be using your fingertip muscles - perhaps holding the tool very tightly and using the balances of strains in the fingertips to move the tool. Nevertheless, it seems we have some learned kinematics, which we can rapidly map from one set of muscles to another, in a way we can't when trying to walk on our hands.
The example of 'feeling the pressure at the tip of the pencil' is not wrong, but most people when asked will claim they know they are pressing on the pencil all the time. Then again. most people will claim they are in concious control of their body. It is sometimes a bit of a shock to discover that different parts are doing complex stuff 'by themselves'.
I agree: there is a lot of hysteria here, and not a lot of cause for it. The more panicky of you can find a paper bag and breath into it, while I talk slowly and calmly about something familiar, like toast, maybe, until your heart rate comes down a bit.
To the outsider, the world of patents may seem utterly without reason. However, as patents are supposed to cover things that haven't existed until now, there are always problems as the patent laws meet something new. There was a famous fuss back in about 1857 (?) when someone patented putting a rubber at the end of a pencil - both rubber and pencil existed: was putting the two together obvious? If it wasn't obvious, why wasn't anyone doing it?
Right now, we have several such struggles gong on at once. The whole issue of computer program patentability is a bit clearer than the issue of business models or games: there is clear prior art. Any Turing complete system has been known to be capable of performing any calculation that can be performed. So you are going to have to patent a computer plus something. An Europe (and, patentwise, the UK is in Europe, here) the program is not patentable in itself, so we are gong to have to add something physical.
Okay - on to toast. The first bit always comes out too light. If you twiddle the knobs, the second bit comes out too dark. If you fill both slots, it may be different. Say - you could stick a computer in there. It would know whether you have put in one slice or two, and whether this is the first slice of the day. It could learn what corrections it needs to apply to these special states from whether you pop it up early, or push it down again. It could even estimate the albedo of the toast from the resistence, and hence the temperature of the filament. Nice toast for everyone, and a patent for me, yay!
Okay, now I want to protect my mighty toaster empire against the circling, predatory rivals, so I have to tighten up my patent. A toaster with a computer is patentable, just like a rubber on a pencil, but the toaster and the computer aren't. A toaster with a USB output so you can control it from a computer might be patentable, so you have to add that as a claim in your patent. A toaster with a general purpose computer that can also be used for checking your toast is OK too. An unprogrammed toaster computer that picks up the latest software from a website would be okay as well, so you stick in extra claims for these. A hear-resistant computer designed to interface with toasters might be patentable too, provided you can point to some innovation.
This is not a completely silly example. Xerox had patents covering the photocopier. Canon patented a photocopier with a computer between the scanner and the recorder at a time where real-time image processing on whole pages seemed absurd. This was worth a huge amount of money as they could make photocopiers, and laser printers.
You can perhaps see why we got here. To protect my idea, I have to consider all the possibilities where the computer is not in the toaster, the program isn't in the computer, the toaster fits into a slot in your computer, the program is in the package but not loaded in the toaster, the computer is next to a conventional toaster and turning its controls, and so on. The more toaster I cut away, the more it looks like a software patent. There is no risk for sticking in extra dependent claims, so in they all go, and it is up to a judge to determine the exact point where the toaster disappeared.
If you have a glib patent agent, they might persuade a judge that there is still some toaster left, when there really isn't. These things happen. Doesn't change the law, though.
Gaming has often outstripped other computing activities. If there are insights to be had, then that is where I would look.
You often cannot apprieciate the qualities of a good mae - they just seem to work because the good design has become invisible. So, let's think of bad games. These suffer from two sorts of frustrations: being too straightforward (you need 50 wolf skins to buy a sword) or too hard (you have been eaten by a grue). A good game slowly ramps up the challenges as your skills develop, so there is always the right amount of challenge.
Now consider patent research. I have done a fair bit of this for my own patents, and to attack others. There are patent databases. You can easily easch these by keyword. However, this only gives you the patents that can be found where you expect to find them. If you have an opponent, then they will be able to find these. The real paydirt often lies where you don't expect to find it. Sometimes you can find other words, or look though everything in an encouraging patent class of the right age. But this is hard and slow: nothing like your original datagasm with five good hits in the top 20. Then you suspect that the real stuff you are looking for isn't in patent databases at all. You Google the history of the subject, and maybe you find a forgotten branch of technology, and you are zooming along again. Sometimes, what you are looking for is too old to be digitized, so you have to get yourself to a paper library, and start again.
Here is a real example. I got quite excited about the possibility of making a CRT without a shadow mask. It is not hard to hit a target the size of a bit of phosphor with an electron beam by dead reckonong. Electron microscopes do it all the time. If you collect the secondary electrons, then you ought to be able to 'see' the phosphor dots like a scanning electron microscope does. A quick computer search showed up nothing. A quick expeiment with a scanning electron microscope, and a bit of screen separated from an old TV with a lump hammer showed it might work. I went to a library to do some research - and there I found a book from 1960 "Modern Television Technology": this had a pile of completely forgotten ideas from the days when RCA had a complete grip on colour television technology, and other people were prepared to try anything to get an alternative. There was even some guy that was desparate enough to try and pick up the soft X-rays within the tube, even though he could only detect one or two per line. And there was my idea, and it was called 'beam indexing'. Beam indexing? I tried the computer on that, and sure enough, it - 'it' was probably Alta Vista back then - knew all about the Zebra tube, the Apple tube (not that apple), and all sorts of other stuff.
So, what do I see? When I search, I have long periods of unrewarding work. I would give up, but often it is important, and I get results by being a bit more autistic than some others. Then we get a new lead, and excitement flares up again. Then it goes all dull. Perhaps the problem (if it is a problem) with Google is that the datagasm flood of leads burns out so quickly, and the drugery of a genuine search where people haven't been before you seems that mich duller by contrast. I hope that more abstract search tools with richer interfaces - things like the citations index that can display networks of related bits of data as graphs - will allow people to go smoothly from the basic search of indexed data to the mining of the less known stuff, and then to the unindexed, and then to the undigitized. And, as you go, your trail can be used to lead others.
It's going to be fun.
I worked for the MoD, but a while ago now. It was very difficult to get equipment from non-UK suppliers if a UK supplier existed, with one or two strange exceptions. HP somehow got recognized as 'reliable' so you could ask for HP computers or calculators. porobably one of the Men in Suits, who did the Civil Service exam, and got on the 'fast track' got given a free calculator once...
Maybe we need a Ministry of Information.
Use cork! People are stopping using corks in bottles, and so the Portugese are grubbing up gork groves thousands of years old, and getting EEC grants to plant yuckky stuff like oilseed rape instead. If you can find a neat use for the stuff, you would be saving a bit of history too.
This is not just a moan - it is a serious question.
In the UK, every large computer project since the Navy sponsored the Babbige engine seems to end up running hugely over budget and time, and often delivering nothing. Often, many of these projects could have been done on standard equipment from the high street shop. Remember the 10 lb military wearable computer and radio that did little more than a mobile phone? The recent leak of disks with 25 million UYK residents' personal information, most of which was not wanted by the people it was going to was not removed because that was 'too labour intensive'. A few lines of perl, tops. If they want to send discs, then can send discs of random numbers, and do one-time pad encryption. If you have a proper source of random numbers, then provided the discs arrive with the seals intact, they can send the actual data XORed with the one-time pad. Not exactly rocket science, any of this.
The usual explanation is a lack of market forces. State projects tend to get offered to contractors with vetted personnel, contractors who have done similar projects before. If you have a military requirement then your choice is restriced to positively vetted people who don't mind working on such stuff. Certainly, in the UK, there seems to be a cosy relationship between the state and the contractors. I am not sure I altogether buy this explanation. If there really is a free market, then more talented people ought eventually to come to the top if the contracts are so lucrative,
Perhaps the problem lies with the national interest. The UK government would have to prever UK companies to overseas ones. Sometimes the competition has to come from outside a country. 20 years ago, prescription glasses used to be expensive and took a week to arrive. If you were going to the US, you could take your prescription, and get a pair made in an hour. Now you can get the same service in the UK. In the US, it is hard to get a mobile phone unlocked - it is looked on as illegal, but in the UK this is commonplace. IN both cases, I don't think there was anyhing that was actively preventing competition: it just wasn't happening.
Suppose a single radioactive decay had a 1/P probability of giving you lukaemia. If you had two decays, then this might give you 1/P from the first particule, plus (1-P)/P chance of missing the first particle but being got by the second one. If P is small then (1-P) is virtually 1.0, and you have about double the chance. So you have about double the change with double the dose.
However, consider ordinary black-and white film. Each grain requires about 5 points of damage in the crystal structure before the crystal can be reduced by the developer. If your exposure probablility is P, then the chance of getting a dose of 5 or more wouold be P*P*P*P*P. The exposure would go as the fifth power of the light level. If P becomes large, then we cannot approximate (1-P) to 1.0 any longer. Put a bit fancier, you are going from Poisson statistics to a normal distribution.
In the simple film example, we have argued that the probably if a grain being developable goes as the fifth power of the light level for low doses. We can argue for models where you need N separate absorbtions to create the critical level of damage, and the probabliliy of critical damage will go as the Nth power for very low doses. The most pessimistic model is for N=1, where a single particule does the job, and the probability goes down linearly. We can't come up with a sensible argument for using only half a particle, and the damage going as the square root of the dose, so linear is the most pessimistic model. There are models where we assume we can continuously repair a certain low level of damage, and when we exceed that level, then the incedence may locally rise faster than the liner model. However, the whole curve will lie under the linear model if we assume we do not repair ourselves at all.
Normally, we do not do experiments on large numers of people to work out how dangerous radiation is. Where we have accidents, we try and reconstruct the doses people had, and extrapolate from the high dose figures to low doses. When we do this, we usually assume the linear model, because that is the most pessimistic one. We then can try to see if the theory holds by looking at lower-level doses - like people who live on granite, or take a lot of aircraft fights, or have been x-rayed. If we were badly out in our original assumptions, then we ought to be able to detect a significant increase in leukaemia incedence in airline pilots, or people from Cornwall. If we don't see anything significant, then we gues that the linear model was perhaps too pessimistic, but we do not have any indication by how much. If the real relationship is the square or the cube, then the low dose statistics may be tiny. However, we cannot safely assume that, and we don't.
We would hope to have a large difference between the worst case for the calculated risks and the actual effects on large populations at low doses. The only way we can know for certain is by giving a lot of people a known low dose of radiation, and we don't want to do that. Things are as they should be.
Part of the Storm threat is that it is able to intimidate those who stand up to it, or attempt to combat it. This would suggest that Storm is in turn vulnerable to an attack by an even bigger botnet. It can succeed on poorly protected machines and lurk in the many dark corners of the Internet, like cockroaches. Suppose enough of us willingly subscribed the spare cycles in our machines to serve as a botnet that would fight the others? Could that work?
Can we come up with a working definition of 'good' for such a botnet? I would not subscribe my machine to any government directed search for terrorists, for example (that's probably got me on a no-fly list). However, it should be possible to confine our botnet to the named botnets in the article, and do 'good' in an sense that would be acceptable to most users. If the project veers towards evil, then there must always be a way to unsubscribe.
Then, we want a fancy UI like the SETI screensaver, so we can see how we are doing, and root for our side.
I thought helium came up with Texas oil. Not all oil, but US oil was particularly rich in it. In the 1930's the US did not like exporting the stuff as you could fill zeppelins with it. That's why the British filled the R101, and the Germans filled the Hindenberg with hydrogen. In the UK, we used to collect all the helium we could from low-termperature experiments, stuff it into cylinders, and send it back for re-liquefaction. In the US, they just let it boil away at the time.
At the time, I was told that something like 1/3 of the helium in known oil reserves has gone, and that was 20 years ago. Probably there is more in sand, and other places, but it will cost more to get out. I saw the picture of the balloon and thought that was a lot of helium we won't be seeing again. You could re-compress the helium to make the balloon descend, but I expect a lot will have diffused through the skin. It does that. That's why rubber helium balloons go flat.
Actually, now we know more about electrical safety, and not to paint our zepplins in thermite, hydrogen is a lot less scary. I am not sure how greenhouse-ish it is as I expect it keeps on rising like helium. But you can always burn it when it vents.
For non-UK citizens and our younger readers...
UK factories often had a public address system - often called the 'Tannoy' - from the maker's name on the speaker grilles. These systems were often used to broadcast the Light Programme (National Radio) and later Radio 1 (ditto). This was in the days before private radio stations in the UK. Nor being widespread does not necessarily make something legal in the K (viz. the Speed Limit), but the fact that the BBC made programmes for re-broadcast within factories for years since WWII without this fuss ought to count for something.
Pip-pip!
Prior art for compressing twenty years' of meditiation into seconds using electronic cranial stimulation, to guarantee oneness with the divine and entry in to heaven...
Whoo. Gunpoint, eh? Nasty.
Anyhow, I know the feeling. As the adrenaline wears off, the self-righteousness kicks in, and you want to get even. Gosh, this must be how Replublicans must feel all the time, wow! And then, all these dull slashdotters say you can get another one off the insurance, and serves you right for not blacking up your data, and so on, boo hiss. The only practical suggestion involved Linus Torvalds' laptop, and I am not sure how practical that actually was.
Though the police may not find it economic to to much about an isolated theft, it ought to be possible for a specialist company to make a profit out of snitting missing machines on the web. We are not trying to outwit the Master Brain, just the sort of person who can't keep their hands of other peoples shiny things. A lot of the tracing could be done without leaving the office, so you don't have to be Robocop. If they worked on a 'no trace no fee' basis then it would be hard to see how they could rip people off, unlike some of the 'security' services mentioned in the other post that needed you to register upfront. The RIAA spends it's time hunting down data that has no recovery value whatever, and they turn in a profit.
I am no big fan of capitalism, but this is the sort of thig it ought to be best at.
This is an old one. Well, no it isn't. However, if you attempted to define what life is, it does tend to qualify. It can move, it can 'eat' and 'breathe'. It can die. It can reproduce. You don't need intelligence for life. Life is complicated in a way that flames are not. Our assumptions of life seem to require the propagation of a complicated structure. Crystals can 'grow' but they have a long repitition of a simple structure. Planets can 'grow' or accrete, but there is no structure as such.
What is proposed here is that we can assemble molecules based on what we have learned from natural mechanisms, and these molecules ought to be able to reproduce themselves, given the correct environment. The correct environment, here, is probably sterile to avoid Real Life (tm) from contaminating it or (more probably) eating it. Scientifically, it will be an important demonstration. Maybe, like when urea was first synthesized, it will show clearly to people outside science that the border between life and chemistry is not as sharp and total as some people would have us believe. And, maybe, we can use them to make other complicated chemicals for the pharma industry. It isn't designer babies or giant dinosaurs designed to fight on after a nuclear war, or stuff like that - just a few chemicals doing their thing in a sealed tube.
It is tempting to believe that once we have made soemthing, then breeding and natural selection will cause our new biology to boot itself. I do not really believe this myself. Most self-learning or self-training in computer programming needs careful guidance before it can be useful. Most random changes kill, Nevertheless, such an experiments would set some bounds on how likely spontaneous evolution is. That, in turn, might set bounds on how likely life like ours is on other planets.
Okay, it is not nearly as cool as going to other planets, but it is a lot cheaper.
The BBC is a monopoly with unique rights to collect licence fees from UK citizens for owning a television set, and the state picks up the licence collection costs. This mad state of affairs is supposed to keep the BBC independent of political interference: to some extent it actually does too, hooray. In some places where logic has a firmer grip, it would be hard to argue that an institution that gets its income by fiat has the moral highground over a collection of ISP companies that have to make a living. Here, in a country where the head of the state is also head of the national religion, we can take this sort of thing in our stride.
However, many of us here who may not give two hoots for the Royal Family or God in any form cherish the BBC. It is a beloved organization - part of the national psyche along with Hornby railway sets, Meccano, Lord Reith, Flanders and Swan, the Home Service, Wimbledon, Airfix, Old English Spangles, Aertex, Proper Sausages with breadcrumbs in, and the Promenade Concerts. In many ways it is not perfect, but we see it for the aspiration that it embodies as much as what it now is, nation shall speak peace unto nation, and all that sort of thing. It sets the standard that our other TV channels have to match or not get watched. It has chosen to set a standard for web pages too, and though that is not part of its charter, it seems right that it does.
Listen well, IPS's. We like our BBC. You touch it, you touch us. Beware.
Yep. They need to cooperate with the silicon chip makers. And that's the really interesting bit...
Carbon can be a superresistor, a resistor, a semiconductor, or a conductor just by itself. The big, conjugated pi electron clouds you get above and below a graphite layer have lots of electrons in a single ground energy state, much like superconductivity. There are hopes that you can get some reduced dimension superconduction in carbon if you an up the electron density a bit. You may get this inside a buckytube where the curvature gives more electrons per unit volume.electron cloud is You could do this by rolling up a graphene into a buckytube. Then carbon could do the lot, electrically.
Fine. Carbon is clever stuff. However, we have spent a huge amount of time and effort on silicon. It is one small step on the periodic table, but one great leap for mankind. When we solder a device to a circuit board, there is a whole technology involved in getting from the submicron geometries and tiny singnals to the submillimeter sizes and microamp currents for things we can physically handle. We are going to need a new technology to go from the microscale of silicon to the nanoscale, quantum world of silicon. This could be thirty years of pouring research into new techniques before we ever get a useful device.
If, however, someone can come up with some way of using carbon on silicon, then we may be able to start working on practical carbon fabrication techniques and make them pay under much shorter timescales. I had always imagined the first application of carbon as some memory unit as memory usually involves banging out billions of copies of the same simple element, so the development costs in designing a single element are allowed to go higher than elsewhere. However, here is another option: we can deposit carbon onto an existing silicon surface - not as genuine epitaxy, but just using it as a flat surface, the way copper currently does. The next trick might be to get the film to roll itself into a buckytube. We have got the connections from silicon to carbon, and just the beginnings of practical self-assembly.
Whoo-hoo!
What is the problem with a small nucleus? Well, if you believed in point charges then you would have light electrons orbiting a heavy nucleus like a small solar system. With a simple hydrogen atom, you would have a proton and an electron as a rotating dipole. With classical electrodynamics, this ought to radiate waves with the frequency of the orbit, and the electron should spiral into the nucleus, with the frequency rising as it goes. The pair of particules is not losing angular momentum, so it should get faster and faster untill some new force - perhaps the actual 'size' of the nucleus, stops it, or it collapses forever. We know this does not happen - there is no 'ultraviolet catastrophe', and the electron can radiate only a few discrete wavelengths, rather than a continuous, rising chirp. And thank goodness this is so, because the universe would be a very dull place, though we would not be around to complain about it.
We now have quantum electrodynamics, which predicts what these particles do very nicely and to enormous precision. Many people find QED unsatisfactory because it seems to involve switching between looking at things as particules and as waves apparently at random, and it seems to need some faster than light magic to make it work, though we can never catch the universe doing it. Many popular science articles love dwelling on this 'mystic' aspect', but it doesn't help. Basically (a) small things are not like big things, and (b) the equations work, so we trust them in as far as scientists trust anything.
With QED we can imagine what happens when we overcome the weak nuclear forces. We get neutron stars, where everything goes to one big squash of condensed matter. With black holes, we are squishing even harder, and then gravity (an inverse square force like electrostatic attraction) ought to run away, and all the particules ought to radiate gravitational waves and vanish towards a dimensionless dot. Only it can't do because there are other things like the angular momentum which must be preserved but cannot exist at a dot (okay, there are ways around this), and the entropy of the original particles, which ought to still be preserved somehow. Sound familiar? Yes - if we allow the particules to fall inwards forever then we get a paradox. Probably something else happens. What? We don't know.
The logical place to look is something like string theory. If you look closely enough, particles may not be dots but lines or surfaces or all sorts of things. Nice idea, but not much help unless it actually predicts something.
We think we can see black holes. We may know from observation about as much about the insides of black holes as was known about the structure of the nucleus back in 1920. Ask again in ninety years or so.
Even old-style phones had patent issues. To make a phone you had to have a good speaker, and a good microphone. The Bell system used a moving coil microphone. They couldn't use the carbon microphone, which was more compact and did not require amplification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_microphone) because it had been patented separately by Edison and Berliner. Edison wanted to have his own telephone, but his own speaker (involving chalk soaked in electrolyte, and an electric motor) was so outlandish that it never went commercial.
Somehow, they must have got over the deadlock, as carbon microphones were standard when I was young. You may still see people banging the handset to stop crackling - this could re-pack the carbon granules in the microphone, but doesn't do anything these days.
You would not readily volunteer to spend half of (say) an 80-year lifetime in going to the stars. You ought not to be able to volunteer the lives of your children and your children's children to some colonization programme. However, expand the human lifetime to a thousand years, and the loss of a fraction of your life may seem acceptable. Add the option of suspended animation and the experience may become tolerable. If you decide to breed at the far end, you can do so. If your children don't like it there, they can take the next 80-year bus back.