Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
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Moore’s Law defines the history of technology. It held that the number of circuits etched on a given piece of silicon could double every 18 months as far as its author, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, could see. Moore’s Law has spawned constant revolutions since then, not just in computing but in communications, in science, in a host of areas. Moore’s Law applies to radios, and to optical fiber, but there are some areas where it doesn’t apply. In this blog we’ll take a daily look at new implications of Moore’s Law in real time, as it rolls forward to create our future.
Now it should be admitted up-front that the Rice University I attended in the 1970s was quite different from the Rice Institute Morris went to in the 1930s. It was integrated, for one thing. (The school had to break Mr. Rice's will to allow non-whites in, starting in 1966.) And it was, when I was there, a haven for intellectual eccentrics, strangely rugged individualists. One of my classmates lived in a tree. (There are wonderful live oaks on campus.)
I sort of "minored" in Rice history, so I know that the school Morris went to was inbred, centered almost entirely on the needs of the oil industry, and deliberately conservative in all things. (Even as late as 1969, when the students finally got the gumption to protest something, they did it in jacket-and-tie, demonstrating against the appointment of a Rice alum as the school's President.) Beyond engineering, which was still the only thing you could get a "science" degree in when I went there, there were the (mostly) ringers who played the football, and debs who peopled the literary societies, and not a lot else. As to the campus, the trees were much smaller then, and it was thought to be outside Houston -- now it's in the inner city.
Still, the idea that someone who actually had a Rice degree (and later taught civil engineering there) could say something like this in later life shocked me:
"If the Bible is the Word of God -- and it is -- then it must be firmly believed that the world and all things in it were created in six natural days and that the long geological ages of evolutionary history never really took place at all."
No other quote I've ever seen has summed up the anti-science mindset so succinctly.
One of the great absurdities of the “intelligent design” debate is when someone says “science says.”
Scientists say a lot of things. Scientists agree (and sometimes disagree). The consensus among scientists is what science “teaches.” But that consensus can change, and does.
If you’re not accepting of all this, it’s not science. What we teach and what is are different.
This is especially true for evolutionary science. A generation ago there was the great revelation that dinosaurs didn’t die out, per se, in one great disaster 65 million years ago. Many survived. Avian dinosaurs survived. Birds survived.
But what were the mammals’ role in the dinosaurs’ world? Some “Intelligent Design” wahoos posited something like The Flintstones, people and dinosaurs living together. And scientists, who could find no human-like fossils going back nearly that far, ridiculed them for it, positing that mammals existed only on the fringes of the dinosaurs’ world, in tiny niches, the way mice and cockroaches live in our world.
Well, not exactly. Recently Chinese paleontologists have been making some remarkable finds. Most recently we have a platypus-like mammal, 164 million years old, buried among small dinosaurs and fish in Inner Mongolia. Other mammals, with similar age, have been found in Colorado.
The control over the price of oil is in now in the hands of global guerrillas -- the open source, system disrupting, transnational crime fueled, sons of global fragmentation covered by this author. These actors can now, at will, curtail the supply of oil through low tech attacks on facilities in Iraq, Nigeria, central Asia, and India. The amount of oil effectively under their control exceeds five million barrels a day, more than Saudi Arabia's two million barrels a day of swing production.
What this means, simply, is that alternative energy research is no longer “something nice” to have, or that switching away from fossil fuels should be a goal.
It means that alternative fuels are now vital to our national security. No, let's be blunt. They are our economic security.
That is a fascination with a scene in history. The year is 1881, and in J.P. Morgan's mansion on Madison Avenue an experiment is taking place. It's overseen by Thomas A. Edison, who has installed a generator downstairs and wires all around the house in order to introduce the great financier to the miracle of the age, electric lights. Do away with noxious, unhealthy gas. In with the new, bright, quiet, safe, odorless electricity! (We forget what a miracle that once was.)
The fade-out of the petroleum age should require us to think again about how and where we get our power, and the role of the distribution grid. Already electrical companies are filling city halls with proposals for things like wind farms. That's fine, but even windmills have environmental problems, believe it or not, especially when they're scaled-up. And the current system of generating power and transporting it hundreds of miles to cities is horribly wasteful. You could replace the present copper lines with carbon nanotubes, but that would be horribly expensive.
The patent case concerning the RIM Blackberry has taken a twist that could have come out of the TV show Law & Order. You know, those shows where the fights are over which of two adults killed the mistress and it turns out to be one of the kids?
The USPTO is worried that NTP is winning the court case based on what they now know to be bad patents, but patents which they mistakenly granted. Not only is this massively unfair to RIM, but the credibility of the entire intellectual property system in the US is in jeopardy.
The case points to a need for reform in the patent system, major reform. But that should not start with changing how we apply for patents, or who should win them. It should start with higher fees for patents, which could perhaps be paid out of future revenues, and an immense expansion of the Patent Office's ability to investigate such things as prior art, originality, and editing the patent to cover only the new stuff -- no more broad claims.
For the last few days I've been needlessly obsessed with a study I found at Georgia State University, about peer-reviewed journals. (The image is of Fondren Library at Rice University, where I got some really great naps during the 1970s, and worked for a peer-reviewed journal.)
The article cites a study from England indicating academics prefer peer review to simply posting studies on the Web and letting everyone criticize them.
I grabbed hold of a telling detail, while nearly half believed open access (as using the Web is called) would undermine the current system, 41% said that would be a good thing.
I should have waited, because today the folks at Georgia State gave me (as they say) "the rest of the story."
It's an article in Library Journal which the publisher (Reed-Elsevier) has conveniently declined to make available on their Web site, which offers the smoking gun.
The article, by Theodore Bergstrom and R. Preston McAfee, charged that the publishers of peer-reviewed journals are collecting monopoly profits on labor donated to them by universities.
It's time to recognize a simple fact and react to it: the symbiotic relationship between academics and for-profit publishers has broken down. Large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear. Moreover, they will not stop pricing journals at the monopoly level, because shareholders demand it.
So far, universities have failed to use one of the most powerful tools they possess: charging for their valuable input. Journal editing employs a great deal of professorial and staff time, as well as supplies, office space, and computers, all provided by universities.
Academic journals cost very little to print or distribute. They are produced, in fact, by researchers who agree to be part of the peer-review process. They are a bottleneck through which knowledge must pass before the rest of us get a crack at it.
Yet these same journals are owned by for-profit publishers, who keep raising their prices, forcing universities to pay for them, often with government money
At ZDNet Open Source recently I called this a battle between academe and open source. But in fact there's more to it than that. There's the abuse of monopoly power, and the acceptance of an abusive relationship by the academic community.
When private companies are allowed to gain monopoly profits, often paid-for by government funds, and act as a bottleneck to knowledge, something is clearly very wrong.
With apologies to Bergstrom and McAfee there are, in fact, several things schools could do:
I'd say we came out ahead. Skolnick is a leader in bioinformatics, the use of computer technology to model biological processes and steer research toward breakthroughs. Furcal is a good shortstop, but that's about it.
I'm being a bit flip here. The point is that cities and states are bound to do better going after academic superstars than sports stadia or fading industries. Yet most deals are aimed at sports stadia or fading industries.
Georgia, for instance, put over $180 million in tax revenue into building Philips Arena, where the elite eat sushi in luxury boxes lining one side, while the rest pile into seats on the other. They are offering all sorts of tax breaks to Ford if it will keep its Hapeville assembly plant open.
But for $5 million in laboratory expenses and $2 million for an endowed chair (some of it privately-funded) Georgia gets Skolnick, along with 19 colleagues and $1.5 million in grant money. Not a bad deal.
One tragedy of the late Richard Smalley's life was that his beloved Buckytubes did not make more progress into the world of real products.
So I'm sure he's smiling from heaven at this news, word that Fujitsu has learned to use carbon nanotubes in a "heat sink" for mobile base station amplifiers.
Fujitsu has even learned to grow tubes on a wafer substrate, using iron as a catalyst. The problems of manufacturing Buckytubes in commercial quantities has long been daunting -- Smalley's own company, CNI, pioneered a process using carbon monoxide.
Few men have ever transformed an institution as profoundly as Dr. Smalley transformed my alma mater, Rice University in Houston.
It started before he got there. When I was an undergraduate I went to a little talk at Hamman Hall, then the largest theater on campus, by Buckminster Fuller. Bucky was amazing. I left with a buzz in my head the likes of which I have seldom experienced. So, I am certain, did many others.
As my senior year began Dr. Richard Smalley joined the Chemistry Department. He taught freshman Chem Lab. He seemed unremarkable. But over the next half-dozen years he gathered together a strong team, from a variety of disciplines, and in the mid-1980s his team found the molecule that would make his reputation, a 60-atom form of carbon, shaped just like a soccer ball, which everyone immediately dubbed the BuckyBall, after Fuller. Its formal name was Buckmisterfullerene.
Look at this roster. Yes there are biochemical engineers and chemical engineers, there are chemists and physicists. But there are also economists, a philosopher, an anthropologist, even a religious studies professor. There aren't honorary positions. This is an integrated team. By bringing multiple disciplines together, with various ways of looking at scientific theory and results, the chances of a breakthrough are greatly enhanced.
That approach is now starting to bear real fruit.
Some of that fruit is finny, like the world's smallest car. Some of it is dead serious, like gold "nano bullets" that might have saved Dr. Smalley's own life, had the discovery come a decade earlier.
Thomas Edison was America's greatest inventor. He was wonderfully prolific, a symbol of the 19th century who stayed active well into the 20th. But many of his inventions have been replaced:
His ideas on the use of DC current were replaced by AC by the 1890s.
His improved ticker tape was replaced by computer networking.
His phonograph was replaced by the CD.
Now perhaps his greatest invention, the light bulb, is about to be replaced.
LEDs are about to replace light bulbs. Vanderbilt graduate student Michael Bowers (go Commodores) was just trying to make really tiny LEDs, quantum dots made on a nanoscale. But he found after fabricating them that they were far more effective light sources than a regular light bulb.
Here's how a Vanderbilt University publication explained it:
Although they are considerably more expensive than ordinary lights, they are capable of producing about twice as much light per watt as incandescent bulbs; they last up to 50,000 hours or 50 times as long as a 60-watt bulb; and, they are very tough and hard to break. Because they are made in a fashion similar to computer chips, the cost of LEDs has been dropping steadily. The Department of Energy has estimated that LED lighting could reduce U.S. energy consumption for lighting by 29 percent by 2025, saving the nation’s households about $125 million in the process.
Cool, huh?
Of course, one great Edison invention has yet to be bested.
Once there were three classes in America. Now there are two.
You are rich or you are poor.
How do we tell the difference? It's quite easy:
In the 19th century the rich were fat. Prosperity meant you had enough to eat.
In the 20th century the rich were thin. Prosperity meant you could control what you ate.
In the 21st century the rich can age.
It's access to health care that now divides the rich from the poor. If you've got a good health care plan, or can even afford to go beyond it for cash, you're rich.
If you can't, you're poor. Are you in an HMO that says "no" like one of David Spade' s Capital One ads? You're poor. Are you attracted by these new "pretend health care plans" that say if you're young and healthy you've got "found money" and you don't have to pay for others' problems? You're poor. Work for Wal-Mart and you're not a manager? Don't let their adoption of their own "pretend" plan kid you, nor their talk of how you're an "associate," you're poor.
The divide -- the key to the divide -- lies in preventive care. Specifically the drugs you need to stay out of the hospital.
I'm lucky. I'm rich. Thanks to my wife, and her health care plan, I can get Lipitor for my cholesterol, Diovan for my blood pressure. My son can control his anger, my daughter can control her acne. We even have eyeglasses and regular dental check-ups.
I know, wow. If she left me, or were fired tomorrow, I'd be on the other side of the divide within moments. My prosperity rests on a knife edge. We call this middle class.
Funding effective long-term research -- cutting-edge stuff that helps your bottom line -- is where nearly every company falls down.
Microsoft has been pouring billions into its research effort for nearly a decade, but in terms of breakthroughs it has brought to market from that we're still waiting for a pay-off. The bang-for-buck there is negative.
We've seen this before, with Xerox PARC especially. Even when great research does happen, institutional inertia keeps the company that paid the bills from grabbing the benefits.
So Google has a different idea, partner with someone who is already doing cutting-edge research, but who is hard-up for cash. Specifically, NASA.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a reporter is to become dependent on press releases.
When you do that, you're telling the story the vendors want you to tell. And you're ignoring the story the vendors want ignored.
Here's an example.
Fuel cells.
A few years ago the folks at NEC were very excited about fuel cells as a power source for laptops. They released a model that ran for five hours on a half-pint of methane, and predicted that in two years they would have one that ran 20 hours on that charge.
Did anyone follow up? I didn't until a reader at another blog I work for asked about it.
What I found was NEC was pushing an entirely-different system, the Organic Radical Battery (ORB) and for a completely different application, desktop battery back-up. Analysts admitted the fuel cell is "not ready for prime time" as a battery replacement.
With high fuel prices now a worldwide reality, the search for alternate technology takes on new urgency. The failure of fuel cells in this application should be a major story, a cautionary tale. But since no one was looking for it, the story was easy to bury.
(The original Rice seal, to the right, dates from 1911, and carries its own story, including Confederate gray "warmed into life by a tinge of lavender.")
Professor Peter Nordlander has announced "a universal relationship between the behavior of light and electrons" which "can be exploited to create nanoscale antennae that convert light into broadband electrical signals capable of carrying approximately 1 million times more data than existing interconnects."
This is big. In many ways it's as big as the original BuckyBall discovery, and more readily exploited.
One good thing about covering space is that it puts what's happening to this Big Blue Marble into proper perspective.
See if you don't agree:
Closer to the Big Bang -- Space is a time machine. When you detect light that has been traveling 13 billion years to reach Earth you're really reaching back that far in time. And now we have. The particular picture on offer is of a supernova that occurred 12.6 billion years ago, or 1.1 billion years after God likely said "let there be light."
The third "space tourist," Greg Olsen, is scheduled to go up on a Soviet rocket October 1. Olsen founded Sensors Unlimited, and is paying $20 million for the trip, which helps keep the Soyuz program going. American astronaut William McArthur says Olsen's engineering background makes him a real asset on the Space Station. (In more ways than one.)
Finland has invested heavily in scientific research, especially since it backed a big winner during the early 1990s in Nokia. Nokia stock held by the government is one source of funds, but overall the country puts a whopping 3.6% of its income into research, well ahead of the U.S., and nearly twice as much as the European average.
The result is that, while Finland does have substantial unemployment, and the problems of an aging population threatening its ample social safety net, the 5.5 million people there are nearly as happy as those in the Monty Python song. (All together, Finnophiles!)
One respondent at the Dave Farber list expressed the view that the U.S. actually does better than the figures indicate, and that government is mostly out of the picture.
Von Neumann made major contributions to quantum mechanics, he practically invented game theory, but what got him on the stamp was his "invention" of "modern computer design."
It's now obsolete.
Von Neumann architecture required that a computer do one thing, then the next, and on through the program. It led to things like the Cray Supercomputer, a huge, very expensive machine that could do this very, very quickly.
The solution to really amazing speed was to break up the work into parts and run those parts in parallel. This was first done in the 1980s, it was applied to networks in the 1990s, and now it's being applied to chips as "dual-core."
One of the most common, and most damaging things civilized man has done to the environment is to pre-empt predation.
Predators are a vital part of any environment. They remove the sick from the herd. They keep the genetic line of prey strong. And they keep prey species from overpopulating.
It's natural that we don't want our oldsters or little kids eaten by wolves (which was a major theme of the old fairy tales). So in most of the civilized world we've removed predators from the scene.
Outside the cities and suburbs, of course, we've replaced the predators with hunters . One big difference, however. While animal predators prey on the old, the sick, and the stupid young, hunters (or sportsmen) want big antlers to hang on their walls.
But let's take off our orange vests and get back into town....(I found this guy at NASA. Heh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.)
I didn't blog much yesterday because I was researching the state of play in Always On. (The illustration is from Georgia Tech.)
I had a book proposal before Wiley rejected out of hand. But when I then suggested to step back and do a book on RFID for the home, I got real interest. Just make it a hands-on book, I was told.
Thus, the research.
As regular readers here know well there are many Always On application spaces, that is, functions fit for wireless networking applications.
Medical monitoring
Home Automation
Entertainment
Inventory
Absent this understanding that a unified platform already exists so that all these applications can be created together, what is the state of play specifically regarding Radio Frequency Identification? (Or, if you prefer, spychips, although since I'm talking about home applications you're spying on yourself.)
The idea is to expand on on this by starting with "seed" tubes that "teach" the carbon around them how to grow into the required shape. The specific goal is to produce one yard of nanotube "wire" after four years. Dr. Smalley describes the final result as looking like a fishing line.
By starting the process with the desired shape in the chamber the scientists hope to avoid the problem of having to "sort" whatever tubes emerge from the HiPco process.
This is power politics. China is pushing Japan out of the world power picture, letting Taiwan know that resistance is futile, and successfully challenging America's status as a Great Power. Just 12 years ago we were The Hyperpower. Now we're becoming second rate, losing our status to tyrants.
The reaction in the U.S. to all this has been silence. Deafening silence.
Few U.S. outlets have covered the story. The right-wing Cybercast "News" Service actually offered a balanced perspective. The New York Times offers only a fearful editorial on possible Chinese revaluation of the Yuan -- at another time this would be called appeasement.
The reason for this silence is not subject to dispute.
But an opportunity has come to make a relevant comment, and brag on the old alma mater at the same time.
One big difference between Harvard, where Summers is President, and Rice, where I went to school, is that Harvard has an extensive Old Boy Network and Rice does not.
As an alumnus it pains me to admit this. Rice offers a high-quality education, better than Harvard in many ways, but once you're out you're on your own. There's no big power network in New York and Washington waiting to give you a leg-up.
But we're now seeing the flip side of this. Rice is a pure meritocracy. If you've got the goods, the Owl will shine his light on you. Harvard openings often go to those in the know, or those who know those in the know.
This may be why Larry Summers has trouble finding high-quality female scientists. Rice has had no trouble at all in that regard. In fact, the new Rice engineering Dean is Dr. Sallie Keller McNulty. The science dean is Kathleen Matthews, who chaired the search committee.
That is not all. Far from it. Dr. Rebekah Drezek and Dr. Jennifer West of the biochemistry department have recently found that silica-gold "nanoshells," another form of the Buckyball first found at Rice 20 years ago, can help cure cancer through imaging. They were following up on pioneering work on nanoshells by Dr. Naomi Halas, an electrical engineer. Dr. Halas, in turn, is currently being featured on PBS' Nova.
Then, a decade ago, he morphed into an entrepreneur, doing stuff at the intersection of virtual reality and gaming. The media left him behind and left him alone. (I met him at a few trade shows during the dot-boom. He should have been a pathetic figure. He wasn't.)
It seems Robertson has a talent rare among entrepreneurs, the ability to make lemonade out of lemons. He explained what happened to the Onion AV Club. It was a piece of blinding entrepreneurial insight.
TechNet wants more spending on math and science education, especially in middle schools, and more tech-oriented retraining for displaced workers.
Amen to that. Both my kids felt math was fun in 4th grade, but neither is pursuing it anymore. My son's school refused to challenge him in 7th grade, resorting to a curriculum he'd already learned, and he lost interest. My daughter was bedeviled by reading difficulties and her strength in math was ignored.
Then Doerr went off and spoiled it all by saying something stupid.
It's Lotus Notes inventor Ray Ozzie. While Ray may think he sold a company to Microsoft, Groove Networks, in fact his world is about to get rocked like never before.
Groove does collaboration tools, and Microsoft (an early investor) is interested in those things. But I don't think Gates signed off on this deal to get Groove's technology, otherwise he never would have un-retired Nathan Myhrvold's title. (Microsoft currently has three people with the CTO title, meaning no one really has the power.)
The bottom line is that Gates needs Ray Ozzie, and he needs him bad.
Microsoft puts more dollars into new technology development than just about anyone else in the world, but it gets less bang for its buck than any outfit since Xerox PARC. Microsoft Research has a ton of high bandwidth people, they're doing all sorts of high bandwidth things, but when was the last time Microsoft introduced anything of real importance?
The last time we were on the trail of Alzheimer's Disease, which killed Ronald Reagan, my next-door neighbor, and doubtless several great friends of yours, we learned that its risk factors were just like those of heart disease, high cholesterol which causes plaque to form in the brain's blood vessels.
Now scientists at UC San Diego have found a precursor condition that's just as important. Before symptoms are even apparent, proteins start clogging the pathways of axons, the nerve cells whose connections and re-connections represent actual thought. (The axon above is from a Coventry, England pain clinic.)
I was at the YMCA yesterday, pushing the old bones through another workout, and a crowd gathered around a TV where Bill Gates was giving a speech.
He was reading the speech the way he does, one shoulder slumped down like a hipster from the 50s. The expensively-crafted words did his work for him. He didn't need to work to sing. It's good to be king.
And his message was simple. High schools suck. The words were repeated gleefully as far away as Beijing. "When I compare our high school with what I see abroad I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow."
Both my kids are in high school, Bill, and I'm terrified too. But platitudes won't get it done. Neither will all your money.
That's right, gang. The old joke from The Graduate is here again, aiming to drive silicon into the ground.
Nanomarkets, a market research outfit with a beat that looks like tons of fun from here (call me) has a $2,000 report out with a hockey stick chart for plastic semiconductors, estimating the market at $5.8 billion in 2009 and $23.5 billion three years after that.
Plastic electronics -- chips built on conductive polymers and flexible substrates, will be cheaper, take less power, and (obviously) be more flexible than silicon circuits. This makes them perfect for, say, mobile phones.
It will also bring a bunch of new suppliers to the electronics market, names like Dow Chemical, DuPont, Kodak, and Xerox, along with the usual suspects.
Academic freedom is the great issue of our time, because it's not a one-way street.
Just as the GPL carries with it, as one of its "freedoms," the obligation to give back your finished tools under the GPL, so academic freedom also carries an obligation.
That obligation is to the scientific method. (The illustration is from a great discussion of bad science from Frankfurt, Germany. Use the link and then tell me who's pictured in the comments.)
The scientific method does not deal in truth, but in theories. All theories are constantly tested and adjusted by new observations or experiment. They are measured by whether they work, in engineering or in creating new lines of inquiry.
Academic review works similarly. Anyone who has done a dissertation knows the drill. You have to defend your work before people who understand it, and only after you withstand the scrutiny do you get the robe.
Politics exists in both science and academia, but politics doesn't control the whole process. The check on campus politics is the presence of other campuses, and the wider world of the discipline.
This is precisely what is under threat in our time.
One of the nastiest open secrets in the Internet is the switching bottleneck.
Optical fibers move data at, well, light-speed. But electricity moves data much more slowly. Getting between the two is like trying to get onto a freeway from an old cloverleaf junction -- there's not enough of an acceleration lane.
Many companies, including Intel, have been working this problem for a long time. Photonic switching is already a reality. But linking silicon directly to optics remains elusive.
That's the heart of Intel's claimed breakthrough, announced yesterday. Intel managed to produce a full Raman effect on silicon. This should enable Intel to build lasers just as chips are built.
Right now electronic signals have to be multiplexed, and packaged, before getting into the optical net. It's a very expensive, complex process. It's one of the chief capital costs a telecommunications provider faces.
But if PCs had their own photonics, they could plug directly into fiber and, as their processing speeds increased, take full advantage of what fiber can do. You could even have photonic processing inside silicon chips. Voila -- no bottleneck.
That's the hope, anyway. As Alan Huang, a 20-year veteran of this silicon laser business points out, "it's a neat science experiment" and there's a long way to go before this shows up on your desktop.
One way I can tell that America's conservatives have become ideologues, akin to Communists, Fascists, and other idiots, is how they have turned everything into politics.
Even science.
I'm not talking about the ongoing debate over teaching science or religion on the schools. It's easy to see how so-called "intelligent design" is religion because you can't do anything with the insight "God did it" -- it leads to no experiment, and ends questioning. Evolution, on the other hand, constantly brings new questions with it. Theories are used to stimulate questions, not end them.
I'm talking instead about how, when you get some of these advocates in a corner, they will flat-out admit that the whole thing is politics, just another way to fight the liberal impulse on behalf of their ideology.
The canary in this coal mine is named George Gilder, (above, from Forbes), and in Wired this month he sings this tune like Sinatra.
Watch him build (then knock down) his evolution straw man:
The digirati are in a fury today over claims by an outfit called i-mature which claims to have solved the problem of age verification with a $25 device that checks a finger's bone density to determine just how old you are.
The image, by the way, is from Vanderbilt University, which has no affiliation with either Corante, i-Mature, or this blog. It describes x-rays of a finger taken at different power settings. Go Commodores.
RSA announced "a joint research collaboration" with the company. But there is skepticism over exactly how precisely a bone scan can measure age, and the more people investigate, the more questions they raise.
Think of it as a LAN on a chip. Not just the network itself, but the computers on the network and, to some extent, the people behind the computers as well. (The illustration is from the first section of Blatchford's report.)
Software programs on the chip, called apulets, portion work out among the computing sections, then recompile the results, the way an editor does at a newspaper desk. (Only without the coffee and the yelling and the pressure or the beer after work for a job well done.)
The result is true multi-tasking. As good as some teenagers, who will listen to music, watch TV, and gab on the phone while allegedly doing their homework, and still get As. (You know who you are.)
The best thing, though, is that this thing scales. You have 8 cells on the chip now. You can have more.
I'm no electrical engineer. I just went to school with some fine ones and picked up some of the lingo by osmosis. But it does seem to me that the "dual core" ideas Intel has committed to are merely extended here, in a way very consistent with Moore's Law.
The key point Moore missed (because it wasn't relevant to the paper, hadn't been discovered, and don't you dare criticize Mr. Moore for this) is that the exponential improvements he saw in silicon fabrication apply elsewhere. As I've written many times here, they apply to fiber, they apply to storage, to optical storage, to radios.
And now, for the first time, they may apply to chip design.
Now that Star Trek is officially dead (no new shows or movies, even in production) the time has come for a new idea.
Here's one.
Stardate.
It's an anthology series, built around various scientific "principles" that define the Star Trek franchise.
Think of it as Science made into Drama.
Yes, it's an excuse to make science exciting. (Just think of the educational spin-offs we can produce!) And the production costs are low enough to put this on the SciFi channel (where Enterprise should have been all along). Or might I suggest a pitch to Discovery Networks, which has got proven talent in making science fun with shows like Mythbusters?
For host, might I recommend Stephen Hawking? Playing the role Alistair Cooke made famous, he opens each show by describing the science (and the Star Trek technology) on which the show will be based. (I might recommend getting several scientists for this role, perhaps one for each specialty. But Hawking is a name. He'll do great for starters.) Or, with confidence this show will last for decades, Lance Armstrong, who's already under contract to Discovery, who knows how to read a cue card, and who owes his life to science?
One big difference between IBM and Microsoft today is that, while both are filled with "high bandwidth" people, those at IBM seem to have a greater creative freedom.
This presses all kinds of buttons for me. I'm a Wolfram fan. I like open source (and IBM is still rumored to be working on an open source JDK). I like music. I love the link between science and art. And the idea of an engineer learning to play music (or tap dance) is also attractive. Something else to think about is how Reiners pushed most of his links into a resources sub-head at the bottom of the story.
I've been re-reading the last in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, called Homeward Bound, and I'm once again struck by the similarities between the U.S. military in Iraq and the Lizards of the story.
The Lizards (not to give the story away) invade Earth i 1942, at the height of World War II. They have the weapons of 2000, Earth has what it had. The overall theme of the piece (which has now run into its seventh 500-page book) is human ingenuity vs. reliance on technology.
I don't know what they're thinking with this latest battle robot. (The picture, which I'm confident betrays no military secrets, is from the BBC.) But I'm pretty certain we're going to have some captured, disabled electronically and then grabbed under covering fire. The wireless link between the operator and the bot is the weak link.
Sometime in the distant, distant past, an animal like my dog Blackie apparently ate some other animals like the chickens we used to keep in the backyard, and it was good.
Proof comes in the form of some fossils from China, which indicate that our common attitude of the mammal-dinosaur relationship (mouse-like things hiding in the nooks and crannies of the dinosaur world) needs some major revision.
How many lives would have been saved had people been warned about the giant tsunami off Sumatra? (Image from Thinkquest.com.)
Not all of them, obviously.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime event, a 9.0 quake (and remember the Richter scale is logarathmic) close to land that shifted the seabed 10 feet, displacing megatons of water in a wave that spread outward at 500 kph.
Banda Aceh was too close to the epicenter to use a warning, even if it came as the quake happened. (The quake hit the town, too, so there actually was a warning of a sort.) But the resort town of Phuket in Thailand could have gotten maybe 15 minutes warning, long enough for most swimmers to reach high ground, and Sri Lanka could have gotten even more warning. (It's what happened there that seems most tragic, since they barely felt the quake and could have have had over an hour's warning of the wave.)
The key to giving warning isn't having a seismometer. You can build a good seismometer for $34 that will could have detected the Sumatra quake from your living room.
For some time interest in Buckminsterfullerene, the unique form of carbon created at my alma mater, has focused on Buckytubes, not Buckyballs.
A Buckyball is a single carbon-60 molecule, shaped like a tiny soccer ball. If you don't cut off the ends, and instead extend the shape into a tube, you have a molecule of almost limitless size, and with enormous strength. A space elevator, as I conceive it, is basically a circled Buckytube that reaches from a point at the Equator to geosynchronous orbit, so that a cab coming up one way is matched by one going down.
But in the short run that's science fiction. There is a lot of proof-of-concept work to do before you can really go after the money, and there we're talking of billions-and-billions.
What Buckminsterfullerene needs, more than anything, is a profitable market that will spur further development.
Wolfram is a genius. His ideas for using the real power of computing for science are first-rate. His Mathematica program is a vital tool. He has succeeded as both a scientist and entrepreneur, a trick I've only seen pulled off one other time, by architect-developer John Portman.
But just as Portman eventually over-reached, with his One Peachtree Center (right), so has Wolfram, I'm afraid, now that I've gotten his A New Kind of Science.
NOTE: For those who don't remember, Portman had to hock everything to build his One Peachtree masterpiece. Tom Wolfe fictionalized it but as with Citizen Kane the truth may have been even a bit better.
Wolfram's problem was he didn't hire a ghost writer. His book is brilliant, but it's terribly overwritten. He doesn't know how to put a period at the end of a sentence. He writes on a college level where high school would do.
He is known to the lay person, if at all, for a program called Mathematica, which has done as much for the acceleration of change as Moore's Law itself.
By boiling down what you can do with mathematics into a computer program, Mathematica freed science from waiting on mathematics to analyze data. The program helps you devise formulae that work, so the results you get are proven. When people would say "it's not rocket science" they were often referring to the combination of math and science required to launch a rocket. Now, thanks to Wolfram, even rocket science isn't rocket science anymore.
Not only that, but Mathematica made Wolfram's Wolfram Research a going concern, a real business. It freed him from the demands of academe. He truly became the elephant that could tap dance. (He's no Gates, but he's pretty good at it.)
Still, as they always say, what have you done for me lately?
The idea is that the subsurface of the waste is melted, at high heat, leaving a sturdy coating from which gases have been expelled. The waste then becomes stable for over 200,000 years, AMEC claims, by which time the material is no longer radioactive.
Well, a funny thing has happened on the way to Armageddon. While the world now has nearly twice the population it did when Ehrlich wrote his book, the rate of growth worldwide is slowing. Some places are even de-populating.
One of the great things about science, as opposed to religion or ideology, is how ready science is to change its mind.
Of course, it's not science that changes its mind. It's scientists who change their minds, who admit they were wrong, and who then come up with new theories. That's how science progresses.
"A black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell inside. So we can be sure of the past and predict the future," is the way he is said to have explained it. Kind of like a cosmic tornado.
All will be revealed, with the appropriate mathematics, at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland next Wednesday.
The reason is that he was born without the genetic code for producing a protein called myostatin. Scientists hope that, by turning off myostatin production in people with muscular dystrophy, they can overcome the muscle wasting in the disease. A closer study of myostatin, its production and what happens when it's not produced, could also help in studies of aging.
But don't tell that to the world's press. Get your tickets to the freak show. He's somewhere in Berlin. Step right up!
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be in this profession. No picture with this item.
I've been looking at this story for days, wondering what to make of it. (That's a Techtoon from a happier time.)
First, it's true. My dear wife is a programmer and morale is down at her place. There's real fear out there. There's fear of India, but more than that, fear of being replaced by someone younger and cheaper.
"Do you know they don't even call themselves programmres?" she asked me one night. "Now they're developers."
Barrett has a year left to run Intel before turning it over (most likely) to Paul Otellini. It's a reflective time. And in a recent talk with News.Com, he reflects on the "complacency" of America.
As Intel CEO this doesn't matter much to Barrett. The company can grow anywhere. But as an American it must upset him, especially since, before joining the company he was an assistant professor of materials science at Stanford. He's walked the walk of education.
So what should Craig Barrett do next? I have a few ideas.
The Day After Tomorrow is a silly movie that wastes Dennis Quaid, one of my favorite actors. (The illustration is from the movie's official home page.
But the scientific principles that underlie it are sound, and here's the proof.
A team from the University of Maryland tested air over the areas affected by last year's blackout, and found huge differences in the level of pollutants.
Sulphur dioxide levels decreased by 90 per cent, there was around half the amount of ozone and visibility increased by 40 kilometres.
Science is about proof, and more important, it's about use. The best answers are those that result in new questions, new experiments, new discoveries, new inventions.
Science is filled with ambiguity. We don't know what we don't know. And science can "change its mind." It has many times, in our lifetime, and it will continue to do that.
But while science is not to be believed, those who don't believe in science, those societies that don't value it, nurture it, and embrace it, are doomed.
How did we get it wrong? People compared women who did take the therapy with those who didn't, and didn't adjust for the fact that those on HRT were generally healthy and taking care of themselves, when many who weren't, didn't.
Think back to the pro-HRT commercials of a few years ago, starring Lauren Hutton (pictured) and Patti LaBelle. Both subjects were well-off, physically fit, busy -- the whole idea of the commercial, to other women, was you want to be like them.
Well, you can be like them. Exercise, diet, stay busy, treat yourself right. You won't be like them just taking a pill.
Einstein's theory is getting a new test, while Darwin's theory of evolution has gotten new proof.
The Gravity Probe B, due to launch April 17, will test Einstein's theories on the nature of space and time by measuring slight changes in gravity from 640 km (400 miles) up. (Picture of the probe is from a BBC story on the mission.)
Once the four quartz balls inside the satellite start to spinning, there should (if Einstein was right) be slight changes in their orientation or "spin axis." This twisting effect, called frame dragging, has yet to be measured, but if it exists this experiment should (assuming the quartz spheres are as perfect as claimed) find it.
Paul Chaikin of Princeton (pictured, from his Web site) was given a huge jar of them as a joke, because he likes them. M&Ms, unlike most other candies, are "oblate spheroids," thin, wide, and solid.
Chaikin started thinking of them in terms of his specialty, physics. It sure seemed like you could get a whole bunch of them into that jar, more than you could, say, gumballs (which are spheres).
Chaikin did the math. Dump gumballs into a jar at random and they take up 64% of the available room -- there are many spots where the balls run up against each other. (Want to see this pattern on a large scale? Go to any Toys R Us and look at the cage where they store the cheap rubber balls they sell to kids.) An M&M, however, will turn and take up 71% of the space. Best of all, how about something that's not circular on top, say, an almond M&M? Now you're taking up 77% of the space. (Mars, which makes M&Ms, donated 125 pounds of almond M&Ms for this stage of the research.)
So take these two guys on the right, taken from the official M&M site. For 50 points, kids, who packs better into a 50-pound drum?
What does this have to do with anything? A lot. As things cool into a solid, they come together. If they're not coming together in a crystal or lattice, if they're coming together randomly, they're going to pack in as tight as possible. If you want to build high-density ceramics, say to make better planes, this kind of knowledge is vital. Simply replace the M&Ms with some other material, say a plastic, whose molecules share the shape, and you have the strength you need to get off the ground with less weight.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
I got a little shock today at Google News.
One of the great absurdities of the “intelligent design” debate is when someone says “science says.” 
The patent case concerning the RIM Blackberry has taken a twist that could have come out of the TV show 
For the last few days I've been needlessly obsessed with a study I found at 
This month Atlanta lost 
One tragedy of the late Richard Smalley's life was that his beloved Buckytubes did not make more progress into the world of real products.
Thomas Edison was America's greatest inventor. He was wonderfully prolific, a symbol of the 19th century who stayed active well into the 20th. But many of his inventions have been replaced:
Once there were three classes in America. Now there are two.
Funding effective long-term research -- cutting-edge stuff that helps your bottom line -- is where nearly every company falls down.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a reporter is to become dependent on press releases.
No, 
One good thing about covering space is that it puts what's happening to this Big Blue Marble into proper perspective.
There's a long, admiring story in 
One of the most common, and most damaging things civilized man has done to the environment is to pre-empt predation.
I didn't blog much yesterday because I was researching the state of play in Always On. (The illustration is from 
Amid all the recent stories about the U.S. abandoning basic science I offer a counter-example.
On the surface, the 
Of all the American entrepreneurs you read about a decade ago, which do you think is doing the best today?
What should a rational U.S. technology policy include? Very simple:
A delegation from the TechNet lobby, including 
Bill Gates has finally hired himself a new CTO.
The last time we were on the trail of Alzheimer's Disease, which killed Ronald Reagan, my next-door neighbor, and doubtless several great friends of yours, we learned that its risk factors were just like those of heart disease, high cholesterol which causes plaque to form in the brain's blood vessels.
I was at the YMCA yesterday, pushing the old bones through another workout, and a crowd gathered around a TV where Bill Gates was giving a speech.
That's right, gang. The old joke from 
Academic freedom is the great issue of our time, because it's not a one-way street. 
One of the nastiest open secrets in the Internet is the switching bottleneck.
One way I can tell that America's conservatives have become ideologues, akin to Communists, Fascists, and other idiots, is how they have turned everything into politics.
The 
Now that 
One big difference between IBM and Microsoft today is that, while both are filled with "high bandwidth" people, those at IBM seem to have a greater creative freedom.
I've been re-reading the last in Harry Turtledove's 
Sometime in the distant, distant past, an animal like my dog Blackie apparently ate some other animals like the chickens we used to keep in the backyard, and it was good. 
How many lives would have been saved 
For some time interest in Buckminsterfullerene, the unique form of carbon created at my 
As regular readers here know, I'm a big 
Remember 
Andy Oram has 
One of the great things about science, as opposed to religion or ideology, is how ready science is to change its mind.
I've been looking at this story 
I'm still a 
The Day After Tomorrow is a silly movie that wastes Dennis Quaid, one of my favorite actors. (The illustration is from the movie's 
Science is not to be believed. (That's 
The results are in. 
Einstein's theory is getting a new test, while Darwin's theory of evolution has gotten new proof. 
The problem with science education lies in how it's taught.
