Why do they do it?
The US government is broken, the Republicans and the cancer that is the Tea Party are actively seeking to destabilize the Federal government simply to line their pockets even more brazenly at the expense of the US citizenry, and global economic stability. They are all rich enough but they are peerless in their unwavering greed and avarice.
They are not dumb, they sabotage all efforts to improve efficiency and spend responsibly, stoke fear and insecurities if their ignorant, credulous base, then use the inefficiencies and broken disjointed policies they fostered with their obstructionism to fan those very flames of unrest even higher! All simply to keep their base aligned to their singular purpose, which is the conversion of a democracy to a plutocratic corporatocracy of which they are they ultimate beneficiaries. And in the process they turn the us citizenry into what is effectively feudal serfs, serfs of corporations instead of barons and lords.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Above Zero Cryo Stasis
I recently posted this entry on my idea for cryo surgery but I have been kicking around another more generally applicable idea for long term hibernation/stasis for quite some time, but have never written it down.
I would love to see research/investigation into hibernation stasis at temperatures slightly above freezing. A long time staple of science fiction - from the Alien franchise, through Demolition Man, Stargate, Firefly and many other classics of science fiction including let us not forget, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Buck Rogers, as well as a recurring trope of video games from Portal to Fallout, I think it's actually a technology we could develop in reality, in the here and now.
The problem with freezing a complex organism like a human is that when ice crystals form, their structure destroys the cellular workings of the body.
This makes freezing a person to put them into long term stasis kind of problematic - as they will wake up dead when melted.
But - other than killing the subject, freezing a person would be a great way to get people to the Moon, Mars, other plantes/moons in our solar system and even to other stars. It would also be a good way for people to 'quickly' (subjectively) travel to the future. But it would also save taxpayer money. Beyond all the space travel aspects, think of the Military - when not in use, tax payers have to maintain the personnel in the military, and they must constantly train to avoid skill fade, which consumes additional costly resources, etc. If we could induct classes from boot camp, furnish them with advanced skills training, and then put them in cryo-stasis, they could sit there on ice until a situation requiring their skills were needed. When reanimated they would be as prepared and capable as graduation day. We would be able to have instant-on-demand military might, without paying for standing armies when not in use. Meanwhile, the soldier thus stored could be earning half or quarter pay for the entire time, and when they get discharged, be as young and healthy as they day they graduated boot camp, but significantly more well off financially.
So - how do we get there?
I think the following approach would likely bear fruit.
Rather than trying to freeze a person solid, drop their body temperature to less than a degree above freezing, and let no part of their body get colder than that. This would require very precise temperature sensors both in the body (needle thin thermocouples inserted into the major organs and muscle groups) as well as in the cooling mechanisms to ensure no transient thermal dips.
A non-toxic cocktail of substances could be introduced into the body to increase the temperature ice crystals form - such as glycerine, mixed with probably some broad spectrum anti-biotics to further suppress bacterial growth.
The subject would be intubated and would be put on bypass at extremely low speeds, blood would continue to flow, and oxygen would be in the lungs, but respiration and cardiac functions would be completely stopped. Almost all metabolic activity would cease, but there would be fuel/oxygen in the system for cellular consumption. This would help in several ways. First, any minimal metabolic activity would be sustained, and Second, when the subject is awoken, their will be fuel and oxygen in the system for cellular activity to resume.
Consider the many examples of people falling into ice cold bodies of water, and being recovered hours later, who make a full recovery. Some of those victims make partial recoveries, suffering brain damage, but others are fully 100% recovered with no deleterious effects at all. I suspect the difference is how quickly the brain cools once respiration and cardiac functions cease, once fuel and oxygen stops being renewed in the cerebral tissues. I suspect that a victim of falling into freezing water who's brain rapidly cools to sub 40 degrees, before oxygen depravation starts to work its ravaging way thru the neural tissue, are the ones that make the full recovery.
It is also possible that some of the victims with lingering negative effects got too cold, and perhaps ice crystals started to form in their brain or other organs, those crystals ripping their cellular walls to ribbons.
We know that a mammal's heart beat and respiration will stop at temperatures much higher than freezing. And we know that refrigeration keeps food (which for some people includes the flesh of dead animals) fresh for longer than leaving the food at room temperature. If we can cool a person to just above freezing, rapidly and while keeping oxygenated, nutrient filled blood flowing, and if we can return them to normal body temperature quickly, without ever interrupting the flow of blood and nutrients, there should be no reason a person kept in such a state could not be maintained for extended periods of time.
To quiesce a subject, placing them into stasis, one would likely require several days of preparation. First, the subject would be subjected to a regime similar to the preparation for a colonoscopy, they would have their GI and bowels completely cleaned out, and would spend 24 hours after being purged consuming nothing but water. They'd also be put on a broad spectrum anti-biotic. The subject would be placed in the stasis chamber, connected to an IV which would introduce a solution comprised of a soporific, anti-biotic, and a saline solution, possibly laced with other non-toxic anti-freeze molecules, such as glycerine. Once unconscious, the subject would be intubated, and would be partially submerged in a thermally conductive hydrating gel. The body temperature would be reduced until cardiac and respiratory functions ceased, at which point the subject would be connected to a low velocity / low pressure bypass system to circulate the blood through the subject's body. At this point, needle thin thermocouple temperature sensing probes would be inserted into the major muscle groups, and thoracic cavity, as well as a probe deep into the sinus cavity. These thermocouples would be used to precisely control the temperature of the chamber and the subject. A ventilator would be connected to the intubation tube, and the ventilator, bypass system and IV would serve the subject for the duration of their stasis session.
Measures would need to be taken to control bacterial/viral proliferation, the stasis systems would need to be designed to offer little vibration, the low pressure, low velocity bypass pumps would need to be gentle enough not to damage any red blood cells, the lungs would need to be kept on ventilators, and the whole body would need to be kept in a hydrating thermally conductive gel so that there was no 'freezer burn' dehydration of tissues.
Upon reanimation, the subject would need to be warmed back up to normal operational temperature, while being kept on bypass and ventilators, and when warm enough, the heart would need to be restarted with a defibrillator.
Once the subject's heart was beating and lungs were functioning on their own, the bypass and intubation systems could be removed, and shortly thereafter, the subject could be allowed to wake up, where after a brief recovery they would be able to resume normal physical and mental activities.
While the subject would be on bypass and ventilated and while nutrients would be available via the IV, the total calories consumed, total O2 consumed and total waste produced during this period of stasis should be negligible, which would make this process ideally suited to long term space travel where resources are so costly, further, such a chamber would be easily shielded from radiation.
But - this process would also be useful where resources were not at issue but instead, time was the villain, time sapping the skills and preparedness of soldiers, or time sapping the youth and vitality of key citizens who's skills/knowledge/experience would be needed in the future, or simply time that remains between the current time and a future time where newer technological capabilities await. Imagine, for example, some of the luminaries of our age - Richard Dawkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Lisa Randall, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, Carolyn Porco, etc, etc - imagine being able to allow them to hibernate in stasis until such time as senescence could be staved off indefinitely, thereby allowing them to continue to contribute to our society for the life of our civilization?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
I would love to see research/investigation into hibernation stasis at temperatures slightly above freezing. A long time staple of science fiction - from the Alien franchise, through Demolition Man, Stargate, Firefly and many other classics of science fiction including let us not forget, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Buck Rogers, as well as a recurring trope of video games from Portal to Fallout, I think it's actually a technology we could develop in reality, in the here and now.
The problem with freezing a complex organism like a human is that when ice crystals form, their structure destroys the cellular workings of the body.
This makes freezing a person to put them into long term stasis kind of problematic - as they will wake up dead when melted.
But - other than killing the subject, freezing a person would be a great way to get people to the Moon, Mars, other plantes/moons in our solar system and even to other stars. It would also be a good way for people to 'quickly' (subjectively) travel to the future. But it would also save taxpayer money. Beyond all the space travel aspects, think of the Military - when not in use, tax payers have to maintain the personnel in the military, and they must constantly train to avoid skill fade, which consumes additional costly resources, etc. If we could induct classes from boot camp, furnish them with advanced skills training, and then put them in cryo-stasis, they could sit there on ice until a situation requiring their skills were needed. When reanimated they would be as prepared and capable as graduation day. We would be able to have instant-on-demand military might, without paying for standing armies when not in use. Meanwhile, the soldier thus stored could be earning half or quarter pay for the entire time, and when they get discharged, be as young and healthy as they day they graduated boot camp, but significantly more well off financially.
So - how do we get there?
I think the following approach would likely bear fruit.
Rather than trying to freeze a person solid, drop their body temperature to less than a degree above freezing, and let no part of their body get colder than that. This would require very precise temperature sensors both in the body (needle thin thermocouples inserted into the major organs and muscle groups) as well as in the cooling mechanisms to ensure no transient thermal dips.
A non-toxic cocktail of substances could be introduced into the body to increase the temperature ice crystals form - such as glycerine, mixed with probably some broad spectrum anti-biotics to further suppress bacterial growth.
The subject would be intubated and would be put on bypass at extremely low speeds, blood would continue to flow, and oxygen would be in the lungs, but respiration and cardiac functions would be completely stopped. Almost all metabolic activity would cease, but there would be fuel/oxygen in the system for cellular consumption. This would help in several ways. First, any minimal metabolic activity would be sustained, and Second, when the subject is awoken, their will be fuel and oxygen in the system for cellular activity to resume.
Consider the many examples of people falling into ice cold bodies of water, and being recovered hours later, who make a full recovery. Some of those victims make partial recoveries, suffering brain damage, but others are fully 100% recovered with no deleterious effects at all. I suspect the difference is how quickly the brain cools once respiration and cardiac functions cease, once fuel and oxygen stops being renewed in the cerebral tissues. I suspect that a victim of falling into freezing water who's brain rapidly cools to sub 40 degrees, before oxygen depravation starts to work its ravaging way thru the neural tissue, are the ones that make the full recovery.
It is also possible that some of the victims with lingering negative effects got too cold, and perhaps ice crystals started to form in their brain or other organs, those crystals ripping their cellular walls to ribbons.
We know that a mammal's heart beat and respiration will stop at temperatures much higher than freezing. And we know that refrigeration keeps food (which for some people includes the flesh of dead animals) fresh for longer than leaving the food at room temperature. If we can cool a person to just above freezing, rapidly and while keeping oxygenated, nutrient filled blood flowing, and if we can return them to normal body temperature quickly, without ever interrupting the flow of blood and nutrients, there should be no reason a person kept in such a state could not be maintained for extended periods of time.
To quiesce a subject, placing them into stasis, one would likely require several days of preparation. First, the subject would be subjected to a regime similar to the preparation for a colonoscopy, they would have their GI and bowels completely cleaned out, and would spend 24 hours after being purged consuming nothing but water. They'd also be put on a broad spectrum anti-biotic. The subject would be placed in the stasis chamber, connected to an IV which would introduce a solution comprised of a soporific, anti-biotic, and a saline solution, possibly laced with other non-toxic anti-freeze molecules, such as glycerine. Once unconscious, the subject would be intubated, and would be partially submerged in a thermally conductive hydrating gel. The body temperature would be reduced until cardiac and respiratory functions ceased, at which point the subject would be connected to a low velocity / low pressure bypass system to circulate the blood through the subject's body. At this point, needle thin thermocouple temperature sensing probes would be inserted into the major muscle groups, and thoracic cavity, as well as a probe deep into the sinus cavity. These thermocouples would be used to precisely control the temperature of the chamber and the subject. A ventilator would be connected to the intubation tube, and the ventilator, bypass system and IV would serve the subject for the duration of their stasis session.
Measures would need to be taken to control bacterial/viral proliferation, the stasis systems would need to be designed to offer little vibration, the low pressure, low velocity bypass pumps would need to be gentle enough not to damage any red blood cells, the lungs would need to be kept on ventilators, and the whole body would need to be kept in a hydrating thermally conductive gel so that there was no 'freezer burn' dehydration of tissues.
Upon reanimation, the subject would need to be warmed back up to normal operational temperature, while being kept on bypass and ventilators, and when warm enough, the heart would need to be restarted with a defibrillator.
Once the subject's heart was beating and lungs were functioning on their own, the bypass and intubation systems could be removed, and shortly thereafter, the subject could be allowed to wake up, where after a brief recovery they would be able to resume normal physical and mental activities.
While the subject would be on bypass and ventilated and while nutrients would be available via the IV, the total calories consumed, total O2 consumed and total waste produced during this period of stasis should be negligible, which would make this process ideally suited to long term space travel where resources are so costly, further, such a chamber would be easily shielded from radiation.
But - this process would also be useful where resources were not at issue but instead, time was the villain, time sapping the skills and preparedness of soldiers, or time sapping the youth and vitality of key citizens who's skills/knowledge/experience would be needed in the future, or simply time that remains between the current time and a future time where newer technological capabilities await. Imagine, for example, some of the luminaries of our age - Richard Dawkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Lisa Randall, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, Carolyn Porco, etc, etc - imagine being able to allow them to hibernate in stasis until such time as senescence could be staved off indefinitely, thereby allowing them to continue to contribute to our society for the life of our civilization?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Robot Surgeons and Cryo Surgery
I was thinking about medicine, and medical technology. Specifically about surgical procedures and what I know of the state of the art.
For quite a while it has baffled me why we perform surgery on patients while they are warm, have hearts beating and lungs inflating. There's all that movement, and of course, the flowing blood, which can leak out and make a mess, etc. Further, it seems a lot of surgical procedures are under a variety of time constraints and I have heard of marathon surgical sessions where a doctor (or tag team of doctors) have performed surgery for many hours consecutively without breaks. This seems like a recipe for disaster.
I would have thought it would be better to chill a subject down to 35 degrees F, just above freezing, that way a surgeon could perform delicate surgery without the heart beating, lungs inflating or blood flowing. Additionally, the subject could be kept at that temperature, stable and without metabolic functions occurring for quite some time, most likely days (*may require some non-toxic preservative, possibly just a broad spectrum anti-biotic). This would allow surgery to be performed over time, unhurried. It would be measured and methodical. Additionally, while the tissues would not be frozen solid at 35 degrees F, they would be firmer, allowing for more precise manipulation.
So - why isn't that the normal practice today? It occurred to me that the issue might be that a human surgeon would not be able to perform delicate.. or actually even gross surgery at those temperatures. The human surgeon's fingers would lose fine motor control, there would be risk of chills and shivers causing undesired muscle contractions, and none of those effects would be tolerable in any surgery.
Gloves would not be an option because if they were thick enough to allow the human surgeon to operate without degradation of dexterity and risk of shivers, then they would be too thick for any delicate movements. If the gloves were ultra thin but somehow heated, then the heat would risk the integrity of the patient's tissues which have to be maintained at the 35 degree F temperature.
So - while attractive in theory for a variety of reasons, Cryo surgery would be impractical if the procedure was being performed by one or more human surgeons.
NOW ALL THAT CAN CHANGE
Robotic surgery has become a viable and quite successful alternative to surgical procedures performed directly by a human. Robotic surgery has allowed for procedures that a human cannot do manually due to the requirement for exactingly precise and fine movements which are not possible with a human hand and a human eye but which can be done by a human directing a robotic limb and using enhanced vision from electronic ccd cameras.
If Robotic surgery allows for procedures which a human cannot perform on their own, then a Robot should be able to perform any procedure that a human can as well. And a robot can perform at any temperature range with no change to performance capabilities.
If we combine the two concepts above -
chilling the surgical subject down to 35 (or 34 or 33, anything just north of 32) degrees F, and then use Robotic surgical systems to perform the surgery, then all procedures should see an increase in success rates, some minor procedures may not see much of a change as they are close to 100% successful now, and the cost/complexity of the cryonic process may exceed the benefit but for others the improvement should fully warrant the extra
effort.
I would further speculate that procedures performed in this manner would result in reduced recovery time and better post operative response. Inflammation should be reduced, sutures should be more precisely implemented, etc.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Friday, August 30, 2013
True Random Number Generation using Radio-Isotopes
Using a series of long life beta emitter radio isotopes and detectors in separate vessels to generate truly random binary numbers. At any given moment, a detector will detect a particle emission (1) or will not (0), and this detector can be sampled hundreds or thousands of times per second. If there are 10 vessels with 10 samples and detectors, then every time the detectors are queried one will receive a truly random number. If the detector can be interrogated 1000 times per second that would allow for a binary string 10,000 factors long per second (slice up any way that a consumer would require).
So ... turns out that a lot of other people have had this idea and are doing something about it.
RANDOM.ORG - True Random Number Service uses atmospheric noise to obtain truly random numbers.
Even more interesting is Hotbits: Genuine Random Numbers - Fourmilab which uses radioactive decay to obtain a random number sequence
Both of these services are available via the web, and a person or company can subscribe to them and obtain random numbers. Of course, for encryption, cryptography, gaming, gambling, and certain other activities where random number generation is mission critical, it would seem obtaining them from a 3rd party might introduce some uncertainty.
I'm envisioning motherboards and discrete systems with on-board true random number generation.
Imagine for example a tiny sample of Tritium gas, which is a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen, very safe, a beta particle emmitter, with a 12 year half life. A sample in a phial the size of a grain of rice, with a detector on each end, could obtain a continuous stream of random 1's and 0's for well over 12 years, which is far beyond the life of any computer system. Something like this would easily fit on the circuit board of even a mobile phone.
One note on the issue of half life and radioactive decay. Over time the sample will become less radioactive, and if 'no-particle-detected' = zero, then over time the average ratio of 1 (particle detected) to zero will deviate from 50/50 to some ratio where it is statistically more likely for a zero to come up than a 1. BUT - a detection even, while happening many times per second, is still not exactly an instantaneous event. The detector is 'detecting' for a very narrow window of time. So - a very small ROM and a small amount of DRAM storage should allow the randomness to be maintained for more than the life of the circuit board in the following manner. The DRAM would be used to store the detector's output from the last - few million detection events, and the ROM would have an algorithm that calculated a running average of '0' events, and a clock circuit that controlled the time span of the detector window. As the 1/0 ratio trends towards 0 being more frequent than 1, the system would expand the detection time span window duration so that the rolling average of 1's and 0's remains 50/50. At all times the actual result of any one detection event would be 50/50 to all significant digits, but over time as the sample decayed the amount of time that the system would leave the detector on would need to increase to allow for the fact that older samples emit particles less frequently.
Editorial on why I was thinking about this....
Well, I like to play a lot of games, and when I'm on the go, a game I like to play is the iPad version of RISK, which involves lots of computer generated dice roles. And I play so much that I can usually tell very early on if the random number 'seed' the game is using is favorable towards the attacker or the defender and I can modify my gameplay style to account for that. And that is sad because the dice rolls should be completely random.
This got me thinking of a circuit board sized random number generator for the iPad/tablet computers.
I also happen to be a futurist, and I think about the direction technology will unfold and how that will affect human life/culture/civilization (now don't get too excited I'm pretty pessimistic about our chances for long term survival - we could, there's no technical reason we shouldn't, but people are very myopically selfish, and poorly educated and very bad decision makers so all our actions over the last 50 years especially have all been doing nothing more than accelerating our civilization's collapse) - BUT... say we didn't all die off, say on the off chance for example, we actually bothered to stop destroying our planet, and each other. Well, while it's probably unlikely, if we did decide to stop the madness, then humanity would have a great potential to spread out to the rest of the solar system and beyond, and we could easily eliminate poverty, homelessness, famine, and improve health care enough so that death would be something much less likely than it is today. If we did so there'd be a lot of people around, since right now we do such a great job of killing each other and our population is still growing. So - I think about what to do with all those beings, the sentient minds.
There's every reason to believe that brains can be kept alive and connected to a 'matrix' like virtual reality simulator for quite some time, allowing people to live on long after their bodies give out but ultimately, even a brain will decay and stop functioning. Over a long enough timeline, if humanity is going to prosper, humans must evolve away from these organic meat-sacks and into a more robust architecture, in other words, must become sentient inorganic systems (some of you might call them machines or robots). Its easy to see several developmental paths to such an architecture, but all of them require truly random number generation. A human brain is the most complex configuration of matter in the known universe and it will take some time to model it, though the good folks at IBM are making great strides already in the nascent first steps. Once these systems start to improve themselves, there should be a pretty rapid increase in their capabilities, but if the systems are always based on pseudo-random numbers they will never make the leap to a truly dynamic, unpredictable system of sentient self aware processes.
So - while a circuit board based truly random number generator would be great for people who like to game-on-the-go, it is also a critical component of the architecture humans will one day rely upon within their own inorganic bodies.
[I know that some people of our current generation would not call an inorganic sentient being a human, but I would warrant that if Australopithecus met a modern human and had the capacity to do so, she would not call us human either. While likely a topic for another post, if humans don't succeed in committing mass global suicide, the most probably path of evolution will be a blending of organic and inorganic components, possibly powered by systems such as these, with more and more of the functions performed by our organic brains migrated over to inorganic processing subsystems until finally there is no need for any of the organic components at all. Over this whole transition, society will always call the beings in question, (at least in english) "human".]
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
So ... turns out that a lot of other people have had this idea and are doing something about it.
RANDOM.ORG - True Random Number Service uses atmospheric noise to obtain truly random numbers.
Even more interesting is Hotbits: Genuine Random Numbers - Fourmilab which uses radioactive decay to obtain a random number sequence
Both of these services are available via the web, and a person or company can subscribe to them and obtain random numbers. Of course, for encryption, cryptography, gaming, gambling, and certain other activities where random number generation is mission critical, it would seem obtaining them from a 3rd party might introduce some uncertainty.
I'm envisioning motherboards and discrete systems with on-board true random number generation.
Imagine for example a tiny sample of Tritium gas, which is a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen, very safe, a beta particle emmitter, with a 12 year half life. A sample in a phial the size of a grain of rice, with a detector on each end, could obtain a continuous stream of random 1's and 0's for well over 12 years, which is far beyond the life of any computer system. Something like this would easily fit on the circuit board of even a mobile phone.
One note on the issue of half life and radioactive decay. Over time the sample will become less radioactive, and if 'no-particle-detected' = zero, then over time the average ratio of 1 (particle detected) to zero will deviate from 50/50 to some ratio where it is statistically more likely for a zero to come up than a 1. BUT - a detection even, while happening many times per second, is still not exactly an instantaneous event. The detector is 'detecting' for a very narrow window of time. So - a very small ROM and a small amount of DRAM storage should allow the randomness to be maintained for more than the life of the circuit board in the following manner. The DRAM would be used to store the detector's output from the last - few million detection events, and the ROM would have an algorithm that calculated a running average of '0' events, and a clock circuit that controlled the time span of the detector window. As the 1/0 ratio trends towards 0 being more frequent than 1, the system would expand the detection time span window duration so that the rolling average of 1's and 0's remains 50/50. At all times the actual result of any one detection event would be 50/50 to all significant digits, but over time as the sample decayed the amount of time that the system would leave the detector on would need to increase to allow for the fact that older samples emit particles less frequently.
Editorial on why I was thinking about this....
Well, I like to play a lot of games, and when I'm on the go, a game I like to play is the iPad version of RISK, which involves lots of computer generated dice roles. And I play so much that I can usually tell very early on if the random number 'seed' the game is using is favorable towards the attacker or the defender and I can modify my gameplay style to account for that. And that is sad because the dice rolls should be completely random.
This got me thinking of a circuit board sized random number generator for the iPad/tablet computers.
I also happen to be a futurist, and I think about the direction technology will unfold and how that will affect human life/culture/civilization (now don't get too excited I'm pretty pessimistic about our chances for long term survival - we could, there's no technical reason we shouldn't, but people are very myopically selfish, and poorly educated and very bad decision makers so all our actions over the last 50 years especially have all been doing nothing more than accelerating our civilization's collapse) - BUT... say we didn't all die off, say on the off chance for example, we actually bothered to stop destroying our planet, and each other. Well, while it's probably unlikely, if we did decide to stop the madness, then humanity would have a great potential to spread out to the rest of the solar system and beyond, and we could easily eliminate poverty, homelessness, famine, and improve health care enough so that death would be something much less likely than it is today. If we did so there'd be a lot of people around, since right now we do such a great job of killing each other and our population is still growing. So - I think about what to do with all those beings, the sentient minds.
There's every reason to believe that brains can be kept alive and connected to a 'matrix' like virtual reality simulator for quite some time, allowing people to live on long after their bodies give out but ultimately, even a brain will decay and stop functioning. Over a long enough timeline, if humanity is going to prosper, humans must evolve away from these organic meat-sacks and into a more robust architecture, in other words, must become sentient inorganic systems (some of you might call them machines or robots). Its easy to see several developmental paths to such an architecture, but all of them require truly random number generation. A human brain is the most complex configuration of matter in the known universe and it will take some time to model it, though the good folks at IBM are making great strides already in the nascent first steps. Once these systems start to improve themselves, there should be a pretty rapid increase in their capabilities, but if the systems are always based on pseudo-random numbers they will never make the leap to a truly dynamic, unpredictable system of sentient self aware processes.
So - while a circuit board based truly random number generator would be great for people who like to game-on-the-go, it is also a critical component of the architecture humans will one day rely upon within their own inorganic bodies.
[I know that some people of our current generation would not call an inorganic sentient being a human, but I would warrant that if Australopithecus met a modern human and had the capacity to do so, she would not call us human either. While likely a topic for another post, if humans don't succeed in committing mass global suicide, the most probably path of evolution will be a blending of organic and inorganic components, possibly powered by systems such as these, with more and more of the functions performed by our organic brains migrated over to inorganic processing subsystems until finally there is no need for any of the organic components at all. Over this whole transition, society will always call the beings in question, (at least in english) "human".]
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Monday, August 5, 2013
Passcode Lock Circumvention for iOS suggestion
Unlike most of my rants this is just a sketch I want to write so I can tweet it to Apple.
Currently mobile security and BYOD are huge catchphrases that many companies are pouring tons of money and effort into.
Part of these initiatives is requiring encryption/passcode locks on mobile devices like phones and tablets.
In iOS, it's possible to access the camera without unlocking the phone but everything else is behind that iron curtain.
My proposal is thus - create a special container that sits in a DMZ - outside of the passcode lock/encryption. Any apps dropped into that DMZ container would then be accessible via a swipe from the lock screen.
A user could put "words with friends", "angry birds", or any app - including calendar, phone, email, SMS, whatever, into that container and have quick access to it.
If said user were to sign up for their corporate BYOD program, then the MDM could send a policy to the iOS device tagging certain apps as disallowed from being in the DMZ container. (the api would need to be extended to support this functionality).
If these enhancements to iOS were made, then a person would be able to drop aps they use frequently - maps, imdb, sms-messaging, etc - into this DMZ container and be able to use them without traversing the passcode lock.
In slightly related fashion, as a further enhancement - for SMS messaging - incorporate the type of functionality already available in Android to allow a user to reply to an SMS message without switching out of the application they are currently using.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Currently mobile security and BYOD are huge catchphrases that many companies are pouring tons of money and effort into.
Part of these initiatives is requiring encryption/passcode locks on mobile devices like phones and tablets.
In iOS, it's possible to access the camera without unlocking the phone but everything else is behind that iron curtain.
My proposal is thus - create a special container that sits in a DMZ - outside of the passcode lock/encryption. Any apps dropped into that DMZ container would then be accessible via a swipe from the lock screen.
A user could put "words with friends", "angry birds", or any app - including calendar, phone, email, SMS, whatever, into that container and have quick access to it.
If said user were to sign up for their corporate BYOD program, then the MDM could send a policy to the iOS device tagging certain apps as disallowed from being in the DMZ container. (the api would need to be extended to support this functionality).
If these enhancements to iOS were made, then a person would be able to drop aps they use frequently - maps, imdb, sms-messaging, etc - into this DMZ container and be able to use them without traversing the passcode lock.
In slightly related fashion, as a further enhancement - for SMS messaging - incorporate the type of functionality already available in Android to allow a user to reply to an SMS message without switching out of the application they are currently using.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Friday, August 2, 2013
3 Ideas to power internal Cybernetic Implants
I was thinking about all the great cybernetic enhancements that we will soon be able to have installed in our bodies, and while I'm strongly in favor of any cybernetic enhancements, I have often thought that the electrical power requirements are really going to be the primary limiting factor for this type of technology application.
I can imagine a day when implants along the path of the optic nerve or a sheet of stimulators laid against the back of the brain where the visual cortex is located could be used to create augmented reality visuals without having to wear Google Glasses. I can imagine similar applications of stimulators along the auditory nerves so that one could listen to music or participate in a phone conversation without there being any actual physical noise created that others could hear, or eaves drop. There are a wide range of physical and mental enhancements that are probably on the horizon, but I know that it would be pretty annoying if I had to plug a power cord into my navel every night so my implanted cybernetic enhancements would operate.
There are many possible ways to address this short coming.. here are a few ideas that I'd like to see pursued.
1) Nuclear Battery - this is a natural and logical choice. Polonium and Plutonium both have 100 year half lives and give off quite a bit of energy for a very low volume of material. It would be feasible to take a few grams of either material, encase in a heat/radiation sink, wrap in a thermocouple and create a small RTG that would produce power for a century. This could be coupled with super-capacitor batteries so that the continuous power from the nuclear battery could charge the capacitors and the capacitors could then provide high/variable output power to the various cybernetic devices within one's body. There are some downsides to this solution though. Even though it is the only one that's been effectively proven to work subcutaneously, it is hampered by political obstacles and the public's irrational fears of nuclear technologies (irrational fears based on ignorance and capitalized upon by fear mongers, IMHO, but I'm not bitter. ;) ) But - I should also note a legitimate concern with this type of power source, namely the issue of heat dissipation. For any volumes of material that would produce sufficient amounts of power to operate high drain mechanical cybernetics, such as artificial limbs and organs, the amount of waste heat generated would be substantial, requiring an active heat dissipation system. Should there be a failure of that active cooling system, the battery might get hot enough to cause thermal tissue damage.. and since the device is located INSIDE a body, that could be cause for alarm. Therefore, a nuclear battery would be best suited for low power consumption self contained devices, like emergency locator beacons.
2) 'Blood Fuel Cell power source' - while the nuclear battery concept is already a proven reality on both the large and small scale and would need only modest changes in materials to make a viable subcutaneous long life high power version (there have been low power subcutaneous nuclear batteries used for pace makers in the past, but those have very low output), the blood battery is something I have never heard of from anyone else. I don't want to say its an original idea, I can only say I haven't heard of it from anyone else. My idea for the blood battery is pretty simple - blood has chemical energy in the form of ATP that is released using free electrons in Oxygen to handle the electron transport. Cells use this energy to drive their processes. It should be possible to create something like a fuel cell, that can extract energy from the ATP found in the blood. That energy is electrical - the oxygenation process of the body converts hydrocarbons and oxygen into electrical motive energy to drive cellular processes. Each organic cell is already a mini-fuel cell. If we create a slightly larger version and hook it to a traditional battery, then one's own blood can charge the battery, and that battery can then supply current to the various cybernetic implants in the body. This is probably my favorite approach to electrical power for implanted cybernetics. As long as you're alive and eating, you have power. So it truly becomes a part of you.
3) Mechanical Motion Capture power source - Everyone should be familiar with self-winding watches from the past, and their newer offspring the self winding electrical watch. Self winding watches today capture the motion of the movement of one's limbs, convert it to electrical energy and store it in a battery. This could be used to power internal electronics as well - bind the mechanical motion energy capture mechanisms to bones in the forearms and calves. (Radius / Ulna in the forearms, and Tibia in the lower legs), route wires from those locations to a battery pack located in the main body cavity, such that movement of the limbs is converted into electrical current that is routed to the battery pack to charge. That power pack can then supply power to any implanted tech. An upside to this type of power source is that it would encourage people to exercise more.. if only to keep their augmented reality systems powered up.
Any of these would be great options but I think I would prefer a combination of option 2 and 3... a primary power source from capturing some of the mechanical energy of moving one's limbs, but with a secondary source - pulling chemical energy directly from the blood. I think that this would be an ideal configuration for military personnel - who would be more likely to have high energy drain devices, possibly implants with defensive or offensive capabilities. Civilian applications would most likely be in social communications, and interactive info-tainment (augmented reality, gaming) so their power consumption requirements would be lower.
Of course, there are also the health/medical applications - powering artificial inorganic limbs and organs (though I expect 3d printed or vat grown organic tissue organs and limbs will be the dominant treatment protocol of the future). Where I see this tech really shining is in situations where a person's heart stops and an AED could automatically kick start it without any user intervention.
Another area of application would be in performance enhancement - using electrical energy generated in the above manner to stimulate muscle groups more powerfully - allowing individuals to exhibit profound increases in strength and stamina.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
I can imagine a day when implants along the path of the optic nerve or a sheet of stimulators laid against the back of the brain where the visual cortex is located could be used to create augmented reality visuals without having to wear Google Glasses. I can imagine similar applications of stimulators along the auditory nerves so that one could listen to music or participate in a phone conversation without there being any actual physical noise created that others could hear, or eaves drop. There are a wide range of physical and mental enhancements that are probably on the horizon, but I know that it would be pretty annoying if I had to plug a power cord into my navel every night so my implanted cybernetic enhancements would operate.
There are many possible ways to address this short coming.. here are a few ideas that I'd like to see pursued.
1) Nuclear Battery - this is a natural and logical choice. Polonium and Plutonium both have 100 year half lives and give off quite a bit of energy for a very low volume of material. It would be feasible to take a few grams of either material, encase in a heat/radiation sink, wrap in a thermocouple and create a small RTG that would produce power for a century. This could be coupled with super-capacitor batteries so that the continuous power from the nuclear battery could charge the capacitors and the capacitors could then provide high/variable output power to the various cybernetic devices within one's body. There are some downsides to this solution though. Even though it is the only one that's been effectively proven to work subcutaneously, it is hampered by political obstacles and the public's irrational fears of nuclear technologies (irrational fears based on ignorance and capitalized upon by fear mongers, IMHO, but I'm not bitter. ;) ) But - I should also note a legitimate concern with this type of power source, namely the issue of heat dissipation. For any volumes of material that would produce sufficient amounts of power to operate high drain mechanical cybernetics, such as artificial limbs and organs, the amount of waste heat generated would be substantial, requiring an active heat dissipation system. Should there be a failure of that active cooling system, the battery might get hot enough to cause thermal tissue damage.. and since the device is located INSIDE a body, that could be cause for alarm. Therefore, a nuclear battery would be best suited for low power consumption self contained devices, like emergency locator beacons.
2) 'Blood Fuel Cell power source' - while the nuclear battery concept is already a proven reality on both the large and small scale and would need only modest changes in materials to make a viable subcutaneous long life high power version (there have been low power subcutaneous nuclear batteries used for pace makers in the past, but those have very low output), the blood battery is something I have never heard of from anyone else. I don't want to say its an original idea, I can only say I haven't heard of it from anyone else. My idea for the blood battery is pretty simple - blood has chemical energy in the form of ATP that is released using free electrons in Oxygen to handle the electron transport. Cells use this energy to drive their processes. It should be possible to create something like a fuel cell, that can extract energy from the ATP found in the blood. That energy is electrical - the oxygenation process of the body converts hydrocarbons and oxygen into electrical motive energy to drive cellular processes. Each organic cell is already a mini-fuel cell. If we create a slightly larger version and hook it to a traditional battery, then one's own blood can charge the battery, and that battery can then supply current to the various cybernetic implants in the body. This is probably my favorite approach to electrical power for implanted cybernetics. As long as you're alive and eating, you have power. So it truly becomes a part of you.
3) Mechanical Motion Capture power source - Everyone should be familiar with self-winding watches from the past, and their newer offspring the self winding electrical watch. Self winding watches today capture the motion of the movement of one's limbs, convert it to electrical energy and store it in a battery. This could be used to power internal electronics as well - bind the mechanical motion energy capture mechanisms to bones in the forearms and calves. (Radius / Ulna in the forearms, and Tibia in the lower legs), route wires from those locations to a battery pack located in the main body cavity, such that movement of the limbs is converted into electrical current that is routed to the battery pack to charge. That power pack can then supply power to any implanted tech. An upside to this type of power source is that it would encourage people to exercise more.. if only to keep their augmented reality systems powered up.
Any of these would be great options but I think I would prefer a combination of option 2 and 3... a primary power source from capturing some of the mechanical energy of moving one's limbs, but with a secondary source - pulling chemical energy directly from the blood. I think that this would be an ideal configuration for military personnel - who would be more likely to have high energy drain devices, possibly implants with defensive or offensive capabilities. Civilian applications would most likely be in social communications, and interactive info-tainment (augmented reality, gaming) so their power consumption requirements would be lower.
Of course, there are also the health/medical applications - powering artificial inorganic limbs and organs (though I expect 3d printed or vat grown organic tissue organs and limbs will be the dominant treatment protocol of the future). Where I see this tech really shining is in situations where a person's heart stops and an AED could automatically kick start it without any user intervention.
Another area of application would be in performance enhancement - using electrical energy generated in the above manner to stimulate muscle groups more powerfully - allowing individuals to exhibit profound increases in strength and stamina.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Friday, July 12, 2013
Nature's Beauty more profound when not marred by religious delusion
I recently took this picture in a park located in the middle of urban downtown Manhattan.
Sitting there I contemplated the following, as I often find myself doing... I thought how there is not a day that goes by that I'm not filled with speechless awe at the sublimely beautiful complexity of the universe and staggered by the knowledge that it is all comprised of around 12 unique sub atomic particles and 3 distinct forces mediated by another 4 particles (the Standard Model).
I'm amazed at how delightful complexity can arise from the bleakness of the universe's movement towards entropic stagnation.
But its not just fantastic complexity from a small number of players and rules at that level only. There are nested levels of complexity to consider as well! Each level is made up of a few simple, easy to conceptualize rules or factors, and yet, each one, with enough time - especially thanks to the random nature of the universe - leads to a seemingly limitless wonder of diversity.
At one level you have the physical particles of the standard model, and their interactions that lead to this scene. This entire tableau due to interactions played out by a dozen particles and 3 forces (and billions of years of time). A few levels up in the scale, on a biological level, evolutionairily, genetically speaking, you have about a billion years of life evolving from what is likely just a single (or small number of temporally concomitant) event(s) leading to the first metabolically active molecular confluence ('life'), and from there to all the myriad varieties of life present in this picture. All of us, all the mammals, avians, piceans, even the insects, bacteria, all us fauna, and all the flora - all of us related to one another (lets not forget fungi and the other biota either!), sharing that common origin, that first random spark of life, yet all this diversity itself, also a result of a simple rule - just one basic function, that thanks to the very same entropic chaos, events that can occur are random and over time, those random events will result in changes, and those changes over time will be shown to be more or less competitive for whatever local enviornment the changess occur within, and that from this simple pressure - which we call evolution - all life's diversity comes into existence.
I know I'll die all too soon, but while I am a sentient self aware creature - the awe I feel that time, random chance, 3 phsyical forces, and a dozen particles - can result in all of this is immeasurable.
It is sad to think that there are many people who think this is all fabricated by some perfect invisible ghostly being, not a natural wonder that is governed by simple to understand rules yet resulting in such wild and wondrous diversity, but just a mundane construct assembled by a being (or beings) with infinite knowledge, infinite energy/power, and infinite resources. Theists claim to be in awe of the universe as well (calling it 'all of creation') but while I can be in awe of a human made wonder like the Hoover dam, still that pales in comparison to the evolution of this beautiful universe thanks to simple rules and particles. Given the time, money, people and resources - I could build the Hoover dam.. and given infinite power, energy, resources, and knowledge, just about any modern human could build a better running, more efficient universe. But - that this universe, flawed as it is, yet utterly beautiful and breathtakingly magnificent developed in a way we humans can understand, made up of such a limited number of simple rules - that it just more profound than any blog post of words could possibly capture.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Sitting there I contemplated the following, as I often find myself doing... I thought how there is not a day that goes by that I'm not filled with speechless awe at the sublimely beautiful complexity of the universe and staggered by the knowledge that it is all comprised of around 12 unique sub atomic particles and 3 distinct forces mediated by another 4 particles (the Standard Model).
I'm amazed at how delightful complexity can arise from the bleakness of the universe's movement towards entropic stagnation.
But its not just fantastic complexity from a small number of players and rules at that level only. There are nested levels of complexity to consider as well! Each level is made up of a few simple, easy to conceptualize rules or factors, and yet, each one, with enough time - especially thanks to the random nature of the universe - leads to a seemingly limitless wonder of diversity.
At one level you have the physical particles of the standard model, and their interactions that lead to this scene. This entire tableau due to interactions played out by a dozen particles and 3 forces (and billions of years of time). A few levels up in the scale, on a biological level, evolutionairily, genetically speaking, you have about a billion years of life evolving from what is likely just a single (or small number of temporally concomitant) event(s) leading to the first metabolically active molecular confluence ('life'), and from there to all the myriad varieties of life present in this picture. All of us, all the mammals, avians, piceans, even the insects, bacteria, all us fauna, and all the flora - all of us related to one another (lets not forget fungi and the other biota either!), sharing that common origin, that first random spark of life, yet all this diversity itself, also a result of a simple rule - just one basic function, that thanks to the very same entropic chaos, events that can occur are random and over time, those random events will result in changes, and those changes over time will be shown to be more or less competitive for whatever local enviornment the changess occur within, and that from this simple pressure - which we call evolution - all life's diversity comes into existence.
I know I'll die all too soon, but while I am a sentient self aware creature - the awe I feel that time, random chance, 3 phsyical forces, and a dozen particles - can result in all of this is immeasurable.
It is sad to think that there are many people who think this is all fabricated by some perfect invisible ghostly being, not a natural wonder that is governed by simple to understand rules yet resulting in such wild and wondrous diversity, but just a mundane construct assembled by a being (or beings) with infinite knowledge, infinite energy/power, and infinite resources. Theists claim to be in awe of the universe as well (calling it 'all of creation') but while I can be in awe of a human made wonder like the Hoover dam, still that pales in comparison to the evolution of this beautiful universe thanks to simple rules and particles. Given the time, money, people and resources - I could build the Hoover dam.. and given infinite power, energy, resources, and knowledge, just about any modern human could build a better running, more efficient universe. But - that this universe, flawed as it is, yet utterly beautiful and breathtakingly magnificent developed in a way we humans can understand, made up of such a limited number of simple rules - that it just more profound than any blog post of words could possibly capture.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
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