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Popgadget points to a new resort that is supposed to be built under the sea.

Unfortunately, it is named “Poseidon Undersea Resorts.”

While I have not seen the movie yet (seems too formulaic from the previews), “Poseidon” is a film currently playing in the theaters.  In short, it is about a large cruise ship that is knocked upside down by a tidal wave and the movie chronicles the absolute pandemonium that breaks out inside the overturned vessel.

Not sure how many other individuals will make that connection — it would be a shame if the idea was indirectly tarnished that way.

Wouldn’t want to build another “bridge to nowhere.”

It might be two years old but the Popular Science overview on the state of hard science fiction is worth a quick read, if nothing other than to have a better idea what Accelerando is about (see my small review of it).

Interestingly enough, the Panulirus interruptus (California spiny lobster) mentioned on the last page, had an interesting role in the story. Apparently it was the first animal to have part of its brain (all 14 neurons in its gastric tract) simulated electronically. In fact, there has been quite a bit of research on them, as shown by the amount of peer-reviewed papers published (more here).

I wonder when the brain of a Rattus norvegicus (lab rat) will be completely simulated; will we learn a lot more about cheese and their true feelings about mazes?

See also Charles Stross’s unorthodox use of the intarweb for correcting typos in Accelerando.

You may have heard the term Darknet mentioned throughout your days on the internets.

In a nutshell, it is simply a private virtual network in which its members only share with people they trust. If you have used IRC, there are private, password protected channels that only friends can join. That is a very low-tech, yet effective proto-darknet.

In the era of lawsuits from the RIAA et al, a new generation of wares is being developed to increase a users anonymity and security. This includes the use of file encryption, proxies to continuously route and reroute traffic, and masking schemes designed to prevent the public from peering into their metaverse.

Enter AllPeers. Sean Lynch, a friend of mine, pointed me to it today and after testing it out, it seems like a usable proof-of-concept peer-to-peer darknet.

It is currently in beta mode and it shows, you can only share 300 files at a time and there are no subdirectories.

It plugs into your browser through a Firefox extension (other browsers will be supported later on). And because you only share files with people you know, there is really no way the RIAA can trace this kind of thing unless the developers install a backdoor into the software… or if the RIAA tries to trick you into sharing files with them.

It also claims to use SSL encryption and BitTorrent, however seeing as you are only sharing with a few friends, there shouldn’t be much of a need to distribute and balance the load. Also, based upon a Wikipedia entry, it seems that it is built on a bug that might be “fixed” and in doing so, would terminate its ability to act as a P2P application.

Note: this is different than a “BrightNet” like Offsystem.

I’ve discussed extremophiles several times before (1 2 3 4) and noted that some have been found miles beneath the surface of the Earth.

While Futurismic may have jumped the gun on a fake story published by some crafty UFOlogists (someone at Whipnet concocted a purportedly original news story about Thomas Gold, a guy who has been dead for two years), the idea of silicon-based life forms is apparently not a new theoretical field in astrobiology.

Scientific American discussed this issue several years ago as has the NASA Astrobiology Institute.  Here’s a concise overview from Wikipedia.

Last year a new, personal business jet was announced to the public: the Javelin.

It looks like a jet fighter and flies like one too, at .925 Mach. It holds two people and is certified for aerobatic maneuvers. Plus, it will only set you back a measly $2.8 million. Here’s the latest skinny on its deployment.

If that’s not fast enough for you, how does flying at 1.6 Mach? What about Mach 1.8? Wired News has a write-up of two vehicles currently undergoing engineering tests, with deployment expected at the beginning of next decade.

Lockheed Martin’s QSST holds 12 people and is capable of flying over 4,600 miles non-stop, at speeds around Mach 1.8. Development costs alone are projected to reach more than $2.5 billion and it remains unclear what the individual pricing will be (they plan to have a dual-use with the military).

On the other hand, if you’re willing to sacrifice 10% in speed, you can pick up Aerion’s SSBJ for a paltry $80 million. It is also designed to carry 12 people.

If neither one of these are your cup of tea, then perhaps you might be interested in the Sport-Jet. This all-fiber glass design will set you back $1 million dollars; it holds 4 people and cruises at 340 knots.

Popular Science has an overview of three other personal jets currently being developed for the budget-minded.

The first is the Eclipse 500, which seats six, cruises at 432 mph and costs about $1.5 million a pop. This past spring it went into production.

The Citation Mustang is built by industry veteran Cessna. It first flew over a year ago, seats six, has a range of 1,500 miles and costs $2.4 million.

Last but not least is the Diamond D-Jet. This five-seater made its world debut last month, cruises at around 360 mph, and costs $1.4 million

The BBC has an overview of garments that are being designed to take advantage of the increasing computer-laden world of today.

While this “smart fabric” is seen by some designers as a means to changing fashion trends (the form), others see it as a way to increase the utility of the shirt you are wearing (function).

For instance, one designer suggests that your shirt could be interlaced with fiber optics, which sparkle different colors and could be popular for those that bar hop.

While at the same time, another designer postulates that the clothing could power devices which are woven into the frabic itself — and is powered by kinetic body movement and the heat radiated from the body.

This is somewhat similar to a report from Technology Review published this past spring. In it, the author noted that medical scientists are now engineering nano-sized devices which can tap into mechanical and thermal energy your internal organs create each day.

For instance, whenever you walk, you produce 67 watts. Moving your finger is .1 watt and even the simple action of breathing produces 1 watt.

These researchers believe they can effectively “convert 17-30% of that” to power microscopic devices. Hypothetical devices include things such as heart monitors and sugar-level regulators.

Be sure to also read, Harnessing your sleep-walking energy as well as The Future of Medicine is the End of Medicine

There is a distributed computing project called Folding@Home that is spearheaded by a group of researchers at Stanford.

Folding@home simulates the way in which protein chains, which are comprised of amino acids, coil and fold into three-dimensional structures.

This past week, the development team announced additional support for ATI’s line of Radeon GPUs. While this is not the first time academia has put GPUs to scientific use, it underscores the sheer brute force that video cards are now capable of; in this case, it is estimated to perform around 100 gigaflops per GPU.

To put that into perspective, I have discussed GPU and CPU theoretical benchmarks this past week and noted that no desktop CPU is currently capable of achieving anything near that number (the newest ones, such as Intel’s Core Duo achieve about half of that). [Note: the IBM-designed Xenos CPU found in the XBox 360 hits over 100 gigaflops on paper, however it is not a general purpose CPU]

It should also be noted that with chipmaker AMD’s purchase of ATI, several reports have predicted that GPU’s and CPU’s will be manufactured on the same die before the end of the decade.

System-on-chip anyone? See also, Moore’s Law Meets Its Match

You can spend an entire career analyzing the numerous reasons as to how and why factories came into existence.

Economically, one of the primary reasons was that it brought productive labor into a relatively small geographic area; this gave entrepreneurs an advantage over the old sneakernet of yore. It cut out a prohibitive mobility cost; or in other words, the longer the distances between assembly points, the longer it would take to create a finished product (a tautology, right?).

This summer’s issue of DigitAll magazine has an interesting piece on how the modern-day workplace will once again be radically transformed. Here is a choice quote:

Rapid prototyping has already had a significant impact on product design. It gives designers the opportunity to work faster and catch problems in products before they reach production. It also allows users to participate in the design process, something that appeals to industries with demanding customers and a taste for ethnography. Snowboard manufacturer Burton and white-water sports company Watermark give working prototypes to fans, incorporate user feedback into the CAD files, then generate new prototypes in a cycle lasting days rather than months.

Rapid prototyping is now morphing into rapid manufacturing. Hearing aid manufacturers Siemens and Phonak are laser sintering silicone earbuds encasing supersmall hearing aids, and makers of artificial limbs and orthodontics are following suit. Aerospace companies are bringing rapid prototyping to the factory floor to make small runs of highly complex aircraft parts. Boeing even spun out an On Demand Manufacturing subsidiary in 2002. Experts predict that machines that fabricate electronics and displays along mechanical structures will be available by decade’s end.

I have mentioned rapid prototyping before. And it is showcased throughout various shows on the Discovery Channel and History Channel (the reconstruction of an ancient hominid skull was produced in one of these machines).

It’ll be nice if you could put one of these manufacturing plants in your garage: “Computer, synthesize a GI Joe figurine, stat.”

Two weeks ago, I walked across the stage. I first walked across it 3 years ago and not much had changed (although the degree came in an A&M maroon-colored tube instead of white).

I even shook some of the same hands: Dr. Robert Gates, former director of the CIA, became president of the University the semester before I finished my undergrad — he looked just about the same.

The only downside is the colorful hood graduate students wear. We only got to rent it (for $35) and had to return it after the ceremony.

Damn those tariffs on textiles.

Also, you know that announcer guy who states the name of every degree candidate as they walk across the stage? What do you think they do when a group of them has their annual get-together? Challenge one another to a sound-off of verbose, cacophonous syllables?

Our guy put the pro back into professional, but then again, once you hit the 30th non-hyphenated character, everyone sounds like John Moschitta (the Micro Machines guy).

Oh, and it was an MS in Kinesiology (emphasis in Sport Management) which is an odd specialty considering just how much I spend studying other disciplines. See my Mises Institute archive here.

And I’m finishing up another masters, this one in education (Curriculum & Instruction).

Over the past year, The Onion has published a weekly magazine cover that parodies Sunday morning zines like Parade.

See all of their Sunday Magazines.

Several days ago I noted that Bell Labs had successfully transitioned into a commercial firm and that Edison himself was a fan of practical real-world applications over “basic” research.

Bloomberg’s Markets magazine has an excellent cover story on the State of Nanotechnology from an investors perspective. One quote that caught my eye was from a venture partner, Conrad Burke, who became the CEO of a hi-tech firm called Innovalight:

Now, Innovalight has to figure out how to roll its nano ink onto sheets, cut the sheets into tiles and attract customers for solar panels it says will be cheaper and lighter than the ones on today’s buildings. Burke expects the first products in 2008. He says his backers won’t be satisfied with a nifty panel that consumers don’t buy, even if scientsits discover new ways to manipulate tiny materials. “If all you do is move nanotechnology forward from an academic perspective, that’s a sad outcome,” Burke says. “Nothing matters unless you build a successful outcome.”

Via Paul Kedrosky.

You have seen pictures of solar panel farms and large heat sinks that dissipate the “excess” energy produced by a transformer.

Several engineers have proposed placing large solar panel farms, the size of Texas, on the surface of the Moon, in an effort to collect as much “free” solar energy that is otherwise irradiated into the interstellar medium. The energy would then be beamed back to Earth (via microwaves) and used to power our cornucopia of electrical devices.

While the feasibility and practicality of this concept is scientifically doable and economically desirable (which is not the same thing as economically viable), some other far-thinking engineers have an even more grandiose plan.

What if you built a free-floating array of solar panels near the orbit of Venus or Mercury? What if this array was the size of not just Texas, but an entire planet? And what if you built an array that fully enclosed the Sun?

Doable? Well, in order to supply the building materials, you would first need to deconstruct and mine a large asteroid or perhaps parts of another planet. This structure is known as a Dyson Sphere and has several different variations, all of which involve capturing the solar energy and converting it to useful, productive means.

And if this was possible to construct, a more complex structure is something called a Matrioshka brain.

You have undoubtedly seen a Russian Matrioshka doll, it’s the doll-within-a-doll. One doll nested inside another, which is nested inside another.

So, imagine several Dyson Spheres nested inside one another. If done efficiently, the end result is the shell closest to the Sun would be extraordinarily hot, whereas the one furthest out is about as cold as “space” itself (near absolute zero).

In turn, engineers could use the temperature variation to extract energy and convert it into some kind of usable means (e.g. Stirling engines).

The end goal in the minds Matrioshka Brain theorists is that you could set up an elaborate space station on these shells. The space station could house biological occupants or simply a series of computers which would spend their time calculating and communicating with one another — a gigantic server farm called “computronium.”

These ideas are presented in numerous works of Hard SciFi, however their existence becomes more plausible every year. For instance, material such as titanium carbide and aluminum oxide can withstand temperatures in the 2000+ °K. While the surface of the Sun is approximately 5700 °K, a shell, comprised of these metals and located a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mercury or Venus could withstand the intense temperatures radiated from the solar mass.

For more, be sure to read Robert Bradbury’s detailed paper on Matrioshka Brains.

Coyote Blog points to a video of a plastic cup stacking contest broadcast on ESPN.

I should note that I’ve seen some pretty good arrangements and speeds (aka Flip Cup) in my college days.  No one was injured either.

My latest piece has very little to do with economics per se, and everything to do with George Santayana’s maxim: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

See: These Days, Everyone Dares Call Everything Treason

The title is a pun of a quote from Ovid, a Roman poet: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Over eleven years ago, scientist and quantum engineer Seth Lloyd, discussed the future development of microprocessors with Wired magazine.

Unsurprisingly, the field of quantum computing has grown by leaps and bounds since his interview. In fact, there were approximately 6 people working in the field back in March of 1995, versus today, where the interdisciplinary industry is comprised of hundreds of researchers and billion dollar budgets.

And while quantum computing is the topic du jour, I was and am more curious to know what the actual development in the x86 architecture has been since the mid ’90s? Is there a valid comparison between today’s chips and those created many moons ago?

I started sifting through old press releases, CPU reviews and datasheets to put together some kind of direct comparison between what was being sold in 1995 and what is on the market today.

Unfortunately, the evolution of the microprocessor has been in such a way that it is akin to comparing apples and oranges. Not only do you have different superscalar designs (which involve many more stages to the pipeline), but you have different types of RAM, bus speeds and a slew of other variables that change the overall performance of a computer.

The Wired article was published in March of 1995. Intel released the Pentium 120 Mhz chip on March 27, 1995 at which point it was “top-of-the-line.” Here are some numbers of interest:

• It consumed 10 Watts
• Performed roughly 200 MIPS (140 SPECint92 and 103 SPECfp92)
• Its transistors were fabricated on a .35 micron process (350 nm)
• Cost $935, when bought in batches of 1,000 (source)
• 3.3 million transistors
• 90 mm² die size
• 16K L1 cache on-die
• 256K L2 cache on motherboard
• Produced on wafer size of 200 mm²
• 5 metal layers
• Aluminum (AL) interconnects

It was considered top of the line for its time, as the Pentium Pro line had yet to be released.

Over the past decade, Intel has created several different chips for various markets (e.g., mobile, embedded, server, desktop). And since we are trying to compare the Crème-de-la-Crème, the new Xeon “Tulsa” chip has the following specs:

• Dual-Core Xeon, each core operates at 3400 mhz
• 24 K + 32 K L1 cache on-die (trace and data)
• 2 × 1024 K L2 cache on-die
• 16384 K L3 cache on-die
• Consumes 150 Watts (rack-mounted model consumes 95 watts)
• 424 mm² die size
• 1.3 billion transistors
• Transistors fabricated on a 65 nm process
• Produced on wafer size of 300 mm²
• 8 metal layers
• Copper (CU) interconnects

The Xeon Tulsa actually won’t be released for another few days, so an official price has not be issued. However, gauging on Pricewatch numbers, its predecessor (Dempsey) is selling for $800. So $1000 is probably a good ball park to guesstimate.

Furthermore, the only benchmarks I have found thus far is that it will perform about 70 percent higher in the TPC-C test than its predecessors (320,000 versus 188,000 transactions per minute).

I posted a query on Usenet to see if anyone has details regarding its theoretical FLOPS and MIPS, and will post the responses when they arrive.

So are we living in an era of Lloyd’s “Million Megahertz” processor?  Nope, but it is getting there.

See my previous post on the human brain, FLOPS, MIPS, and Watts. Be sure to also check out Geordie Rose’s blog as well as “Programming the Universe” by Seth Lloyd.

Someone had to do it. And I’m sure she is now making lots of money doing it.

For a low, bargain-basement price of $125 you can submit a picture of your rump to Madame Stallone and get her to analyze it… to learn more about who you are and what your Lotto numbers should be.

See also the quacky phrenology (or as it is sometimes refered to, bump-ology) and P.T. Barnum.

Thanks to BK Marcus, I can now say I’ve seen everything: Armor of God PJs

Apropos my discussion on how much firms should spend on research and development, economist Peter Klein notes that Bell Labs seems to have successfully transitioned into a commercially-based R&D center (e.g. for-profit).

That’s good news for consumers everywhere.

Reminds me of Thomas Edison. His first patent (#90,646) was for an electronic voting machine and it subsequently resulted in poor sales. As a result, he purportedly swore to only invent commercially viable products from then on. Or in other words: don’t invent for the sake of inventing, but instead for practical, market-demanded uses.

The internets are abuzz with news that Facebook added a “blogging” feature.

I just tested it out, and while you can now incorporate your blog into your profile, you can’t do the opposite — there is no output RSS feed for the world to consume your thoughts.

So while the FB devs are busy creating a cleaner, more niche MySpace, the very nature of their operating model (a Walled Garden) prevents this new tool - and its musings - from becoming part of the larger blogosphere corpus.

My closing thoughts: it will probably help increase time logged into the system, as users will be busy writing and reading the notebook entries of their friends. Thus, in the end, their advertisers will benefit in the long-run (more page impressions, more eyeballs and more clicks). Smart business move.

Too bad end-users (those creating the content) won’t be able to directly benefit from the ad revenue.

Robert Scoble pointed to a couple of interesting stories today.

The first is a step-by-step tutorial on how to create a machinima (movie created in a virtual world) to help train employees in a corporate environment.  He uses the increasing popular Second Life platform.

The other story discusses a new course at San Jose State University that teaches journalists how to use podcasting as a productive medium.

See also Metaverse.