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Archive for future

Transparency and Trees on the Ground

February 19, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Transparency and Trees on the Ground

Image from www.abovetopsecret.com

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown

 

Oh I love this one.  I may call Lockheed to see what the status is, because the original article is from the turn of 2k, which puts it a touch out of date.

But it’s “clever”.  I love clever.  I love the idea of re-purposing things, of taking a technology designed for a single type of efficiency and adapting it for another.  I feel there is no f*cking reason that we can’t get our sh*t together and fix things when we break them.  That’s what we DO.  As a species, we solve problems.  If we can’t adapt, we make things adapt.

At the same time, I am fascinated by what goes WRONG when you try this as well.  This seems like a perfectly reasonable plan.  Laying down tree seeds instead of mines.  It was reportedly in testing and working well, the engineering had been done, the plans had been laid.

And then *poof*.  It’s gone.  Not another word.

I’ve got reasonably strong Google-fu, so if there is anything publicly available out there, I ought to be able to find it.  But nothing, nada.

Now I know it’s never pleasant to have to go online, or in front of a board, or to your parents or boss or best friend and report that this *really* cool expensive idea just didn’t pan out.  Fail fast and silently, that’s the Silicon Valley way.  But one of the benefits of transparency is that someone out there might just have the solution to your problem.

Catch and Destroy

February 16, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Catch and Destroy

Image from Astrobiology Magazine online

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja507983x

 

Walter Jon Williams may have described it most clearly in his novel “Aristoi”, the idea that any nano-technological critter, given the ability to reproduce, can go bad and take over a whole environment, devouring everything it can reach.  If you are a cyberpunk/hard sci-fi fan, you may have heard of it as “Mataglap” or “Grey Goo”.  It begs the question, how do you control against a microscopically sized organism?  Or more to the point, how can you control against them on the fly, away from lab facilities and clean rooms?

Here and now, for biological organisms, there is a solution.  Specialized adhesive tapes that can be impregnated with chemical compounds to neutralize biological organisms.  The kinds of germs, bugs and viruses that many imagine the architecture of future nano-particles will be based upon.

As always, the link’s there at the top so you can read the original article for yourself and decide if you’re going to be taping the cracks around your windows closed in case the Measles epidemic comes to your street in suburbia.

 

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