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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (44617)	9/17/2003 2:58:40 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50167

Tech Update I'm astounded by the pace of technological development especially after receiving my weekly electronic mail from Kurzweil. Despite the plethora of texts on cosmology, a new one has come out. James N. Gardner's Selfish Biocosm hypothesis proposes that the remarkable anthropic (life-friendly) qualities that our universe exhibits can be explained as incidental consequences of a cosmic replication cycle in which a cosmologically extended biosphere provides a means for the cosmos to produce one or more baby universes. The cosmos is "selfish" in the same sense that Richard Dawkins proposed that genes are focused on their own replication. Ray Kurzweil responds with a defence of his hypothesis, the "law of accelerating returns". He discusses that not only has our growth rate been historically higher in the history of human existence but growth itself has been growing at an exponential rate. For instance the development lags between distinct technological phases are shrinking, after all we can all remember the birth of the internet within our lifetimes and the tremendous impact its had on our society within a mere decade. Growth historically has been a phenomenon that is gradual and measured over the span of generations whereas now the acceleration has quicked to such an extent that forecasting could soon become a defunct science. An example of this trend is the nanotech, which basically concerns with very small things (a nano is an imperceptible unit of time in it's Greek etymology). For a better and more fruitful discussion on nano technology I would recommend this article (sourced via Pejman Pundit), which clearly reflects the true potential (instead of the hype) and the hazards posed by nanotechnology. Nanotech could putatively shrink production costs, facilities and has applications in fields such as medicine where even now Agilent is developing microfluidics for proteomics and nanopore technology that could eventually "sequence the genome in a few hours" and do DNA analysis in the doctor's office. Kurzweil reports that a nanotech cluster has been established in northern California, where overlap with information technology could lead to significant technological spinoffs. Of course ominously China is hosting a nanotech industry with over 600 venture capital firms specialising in nano tech based there. On other news Bill Joy, developed Java code, designed UNIX (Berkeley variant) and grand tech strategies, has stepped down as chief scientist of Sun Micro systems after having founded it 21years ago. The man is highly accomplished and I'm sure that the field he devotes his talents to will have a windfall from his genius. Of course he is rather pessimistic having authored an article in 2001 about the perils of technological progress. Energy to be harnessed from primitive sugar particles. I must admit when I first read the article I thought we'd see a boon in sugar cane fields and a spinoff for the sugar producing tropical however the process is far more chemical than agro-industrial. Researchers have demonstrated that Rhodoferax ferrireducens, a bacterium first isolated from sediments collected from an aquifer in Virginia, fed on the sugar, it transferred electrons directly to the electrode, producing a current. In addition, the sugar-fed R. ferrireducens continued to grow, resulting in stable, long-term power production. The scientists also tested the bacterium's ability to convert other sugars, including fructose, sucrose and xylose (present in wood and straw), and found it to be equally efficient. The new findings should help scientists harness the abundant energy currently stored in waste from agricultural, municipal and industrial sources. The prototype fuel cells have such desirable features as the ability to recharge and minimum loss of energy while idling. The promises of compressed coding will allow the rise of speech processing doing away entirely keyboard and mouse with voice control being a reality (though it already has some limited application for mobile phones). Finally in military research, which is always interesting, there is a parallel advance of computerisation whereby efforts are being made to recreate the human body electronically to finetune research and development. It would be able to test weapons, drugs, new medical procedures, refine medic training and finally also phase out the need for guinea pigs (human or animal). The Virtual Soldier Project, as it is called, aims to create an exact, computerized copy of every part of a person's body could culminate the modelling and simulation sciences. The effects would spinoff into the pharmaceutical industry whereby modelling & simulation could allow for the streamlining of research and massively reduce the expensive drug trials currently held (which have a commesurate rise on the high drug prices prevailing in the United States). I remember reading sometime back about the most important development in mathematics (I can't remember enough to reproduce coherently but fundamentally it has to do with equivocation) however I would contend that the key statistical development are the the development of probabilities that allow for the quantification of risk and reasonable certainty in simulating, modelling and forecasting. The natural sciences have already taken to modelling whether it be in geology and agriculture, where crop yields are tested in the face of changing climatic and topographic conditions and meteorology, where weather conditions are forecasted with the assistance of a supercomputer. Advanced modelling allowed for simulation of nuclear explosion by American scientists thereby testing virtually every nuclear device in the United States (contrast to the Indo-Pak nations which had to resort to primitive underground testing) and even in finance whereby the pricing of credit instruments is intrinsically linked to the simulation of default probability and events. At any rate I come to the end of the science update with a renewed appreciation of our progress and the growing marvels that we are privileged to bear witness to in our lifetime. Zachary Latif 17:16 latif.blogspot.com