Future Salon

Spimodo: Gizmos, Blobjects, Spimes

If you are looking for a visionary talk, Bruce Sterling' Seagraph keynote certainly hits the mark.

It's a call for the designers to conquer not only the digital world, but also the world of atoms. With barcode reader on your cell phone you can already find out the background to a product line and company right in the store. Soon to come so his vision, you will get with every purchase of a product the life history and all other needed information transfered to you too. From the design blueprint to the oh so important way to safely dispose it.

In the whole process you play a part in the feedback loop to the producer, as you do already with your purchases at Amazon: Improving the offerings and the processes of Amazon.com. You become a Wrangler.

He calls these things that go beyond Gizmos: Spimes as in merging the words Space and Time. I agree with Alex from Worldchanging Spime is not a good word, way to close to spine and therefore to spineless. Who wants that?

But it is quite possible, that Spimodo is coming to an RSS reader of your choice soon.

Voting via Floating

I almost overlooked our friends in San Diego had an interesting session this month about Seasteading.

Land is taken, let's create land on the sea. In modular structures, that can be linked together to form a community. Advantage: If you don't like the politics or gasp the taxes of your current society, you pull up your seastead and float it over to where the sea is greener.

Intel's 486 CPU turns 15

This article talks about the 15 year period from April 1989 to April 2004. In April 1989, the 33MHz Intel 486 was introduced. I checked Intel's website and their current high-end offering is a 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4.

So, what's the "rate of acceleration" from 33 MHz to 3.4 GHz in 15 years? I'll do the math for you. That's a factor of 103 increase. That comes out to a factor of 1.36 per year, or 36% increase per year. That's a doubling time of 2.24 years. (Close enough to 2.25 to round, I'd say.)

Now, this calculation looks only at clock speed, and neglects the fact that the new chips are "hyperthreading", and all the other cpu pipeline improvements that have been made. So the actual difference in performance between the 33 Mhz 486 and today's Pentium 4 is much more that 103x. Exactly how much, I don't know.

Where Are We Now?

I wanted to tell you all about this article: From the ashes: The next stage of EDA". I know it's a bit technical for some of you, but I think it's worth reading carefully anyway, because it gives a good overview of "Where we are now" -- where we are in the ongoing Moore's Law saga, the current problems facing the semiconductor industry, and the surprising ways people are changing what they are doing in response. (The figures are in annoying PDF files, but still worth checking out.)

Forgotten Technology

Wow, I guess Wallace T. Wallington rediscovered an old technology with which he is not only able to move, but also raise a 19,200 lbs block of concrete by himself. Forgotten Technology (Click on the pictures to see little demonstrations, absolutely amazing.)

He estimates:

I could build The Great Pyramid of Giza, using my techniques and primitive tools. On a twenty-five year construction schedule, (working forty hours per week at fifty weeks per year, using the input of myself to calculate) I would need a crew of 520 people to move blocks from the main quarry to the site and another 100 to move the blocks on site. For hoisting I need a crew of 120 (40 working and 80 rotating). My crew can raise 7000 lb. 100 ft. per minute. I have found the design of the pyramid is functional in it’s own construction. No external ramp is needed.

Spread the word, how much productivity will we gain, especially in third world countries? And sell your Caterpillar stocks :-) [Via Quote-a-Day]

r vs K strategy

For those of you who were following our conversation at the last Future Salon on r vs K strategy, I got the r and K backwards. r strategists are the ones with the high reproductive and mortality rate, K strategists are the ones with the low reproductive and mortality rate. For an explanation, see Checks on Population Growth.

Basically, the context of the conversation goes like this: Michael was discussing terrorism, and saying that eventually a terrorist group will get their hands on nuclear weapons. I asked if he thought this was a situation of r-strategy vs K-strategy. The link here is that terrorists depend on a continuous supply of 'expendable' people for suicide attacks. Large supply of 'expendable' people suggests tendency towards r-strategy (to use the correct term this time.)

Was George Gilder Wrong?

I was reading a paper by Jim Gray (the same dude I was talking about in my Information Overload posting) called Distributed Computing Economics. He said, "Over the last 40 years, telecom prices have fallen much more slowly than any other information technology. If this situation changed, it could completely alter the arguments here. But there is no obvious sign [as of March 2003] of that occuring." This is a direct contradiction with Gilder's Law, which, as you'll recall from reading my handy-dandy List of Laws, claims that network bandwidth doubles every 9 months.

Information Overload

In this interview, Jim Gray talks about how storage capacity has exceeded Moore's Law and asserts that "programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device". Believe it or not.

A Conversation with Jim Gray

What on earth is all this storage being used for?

Long Now Seminar: Long Term Policy Planning

Notes from the James Dewar lecture yesterday at the The Long Now Foundation seminar series.

The success rate of long term predictions have been sketchy. That shouldn't discourage us from learning from our past mistakes and fine tune our approach. James Dewar yesterday introduced such a new approach to Long Term Policy Analysis (LTPA). The premise is, that the future is uncertain. Therefore let's search for what we can do today that best keep us on track no matter what the future brings.

Hacking Matter using Quantum Dots

After Wil McCarthy's talk: Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter I overheard the following conversation: "Sounds like Snake Oil to me." "Well, if it is true, then one can make excellent snake oil out of it."

The "it" that Wil McCarthy was talking about in his presentation are microscopic small devices called "Quantum Dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and these properties can be changed at will. Properties like color, transparency, thermochromicity, fluorescence, many others still undiscovered.