Beowolf

I stand there recording video as the accident unfolds. Later I'll offer the video to the families of the deceased to use in their lawsuit against the railroad. They had a responsibility not to let people work on active tracks without a warning system. As for the lever? I'm not a rail worker and don't know what that lever does. What if it diverts the train into a nearby elementary school? What if diverting the train causes a derailment that kills a dozen passengers? It's not like the lever's positions are labelled, "Kill 5 people", "Kill 1 person". If they were, I still wouldn't touch it, but would be sure to get video of it so the railroad'll get charged with murder since it was obviously planned. Plus it's evidence to use in my own mental anguish lawsuit against them. I get the theory behind the scenario. In an idealized fantasy world, sure I'd pull the lever and choose 1 death over 5. But in the world where I actually live, people get sued for any sort of "helpful" interference. For example, in New Jersey in 2009, a car in the right lane stopped to let a motorcycle pull out. Motorcyclist pulled past the car and proceeded into the left lane, where he got hit. So the cyclist sues the guy who waved him out, because supposedly it was HIS job to check that all lanes were clear. Motorcyclist won, to the tune of $1.5 million. Screw that stuff!

I decided a while back I was totally done with space games that do WWII aircraft combat. If your game has a "spaceship" that has a top speed, has to run the engine to maintain that speed, banks into turns, and only fires it's weapons in the direction where the nose is pointed, then it's a WWII airplane and you won't get my money. When I'm in the mood to dogfight with machine guns, there are plenty of flight sims that do it better. Give me something NEW!

I read older female lobsters keep getting more fertile too, producing more eggs every season. Interesting article here.

It's my impression MIT's current work involves smart materials, so good idea!

One problem with "multiple rockets...flying very close together" is the atmospheric shock wave. Picture the cone-shaped shock wave coming off the highest point of a rocket. If any other parts of the rocket, like large side boosters, stick through that cone, air resistance goes up hugely, making it difficult to keep accelerating, and producing stresses that can easily rip your vehicle apart. In aircraft design, this is known as area rule. Several 1950s fighters were terrible underperformers until we figured out what was going on. Slower aircraft can't casually fly close together either. Even below mach 1, the airflows interfere with one another, causing little areas of extra lift or no lift moving over the wings. Close formation flying's a significant skill for pilots, and even after years of training and practice, the constantly changing conditions cause occasional .

SpaceX has mentioned this as a goal for Falcon Heavy. They said their lower cost should overcome customer resistance due to those very real problems Nova and others above have already described. Plus they're planning to launch something like one a month, which could make rescheduling easier, depending on specific orbits and such.

Once I did a lot of research on those suits. Jerry Pournelle often used these elastic suits in his fiction, and I was determined to find out exactly why we weren't using this awesome idea. Well, they worked great...almost. NASA worked on them for several years, but eventually gave up and assigned the research to MIT, to see if they could solve the two remaining problems: 1) The suits take literally hours to get into. The astronaut's essentially wrapping seven layers of Ace bandages, applied with lots of tension, over every inch from the neck down. By the time a team finished getting one astronaut dressed, they'd be too exhausted to work. 2) The other problem was male crotches. Testicles don't like being individually wrapped really tightly, and if there was any gap left at all the testicle would painfully expand into it. They couldn't work out any sort of cup design that'd hold against the pressure difference and not be too painful to wear. In his novels, Pournelle thought women's breasts would be the problem, but they said it was just like a sports bra. Men got the bad end of the gender stick this time.

Wanna bet? Variable Star, by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson

Plutonium's rare because it has to be made. Uranium's all over, in tiny concentrations. Any nanotech that can manipulate atoms can sort out the U235 present in dirt to build a Hiroshima-style bomb. I don't know how many kilotons or megatons of dirt one has to sort through to acquire a critical mass of U235, but it's going to make a big profileration problem. Even the poorest of nations can get their hands on megatons of dirt. So the only limiting factor will be whether they can get isotope-sorting nanotech. Slightly richer nations, or groups, could just buy uranium ore and enrich that. But I agree that the current "nuclear club" would clamp down on uranium ore sales pretty quickly once this tech became available. And, Bill, in the US, stores record and report all significant purchases of those chemicals now. Your location may differ. But the days when one could casually buy a truckload of ammonia fertilizer and powdered aluminum are gone forever here. edit: No I guess they won't be able to clamp down on uranium ore. I was just looking up uranium mining to see the volume (60k tons/year), and saw there's already a way to easily extract uranium from sea water. It's too expensive to compete with traditional mining right now, but for about US$250,000 you could harvest enough U from the ocean over 8 months to have enough for a bomb...if you had a way to enrich it. Creepy.

Agreed, by that definition we've been through several: Fire, speech, agriculture, industrialism. I've heard it claimed the bronze age should count, too. Blogger had a bunch of reasons, but the one I remember is invention of money. Vernor Vinge's original use of that term was because we can't see past a singularity's event horizon. People before one of these world-changing events cannot see what civilization will look like afterwards. That civilization gets shaped by side-effects of side-effects of concepts we don't even have yet, as much as it does by the obvious stuff. Kurzweil's AI singularity was the one the media noticed. But IMO the singularity we'll fall into the year robots get cheaper than Asian rice farmers is just as scary and may arrive sooner. A bunch of unemployable young men is a traditional recipe for war! Same for if/when a 3D printer can economically print a new iPhone, or if/when a geneticist can sell custom-designed life forms as pets*. ----- *I'd like a 20-pound housebroken ankylosaur, please. - - - Updated - - - Not all that funny. Sometimes it gets downright annoying. //END REPLY

I disagree with your assumption. "Because animals do it", isn't a sufficient reason. Would we also feel a need for AIs to have a s.e.x drive? That "sense of satisfaction" you're talking about is accomplished through a highly-addictive dopamine reward loop that humans "hack" to misuse a billion times a day. I'm doing it right now (holds up coffee cup). Why load an artificially-created being down with such baggage? All my current digital gadgets do their jobs without such things. My body's doing hundreds of jobs without needing an emotional push right now, processing vision and sound, and digesting food, for example. So why not design our AI so that caring for humanity takes place below its conscious level? They've identified two specific cortical columns in our brains that scan incoming vision and identify circles and semicircles. That's all they do, day after day. Neither my intellect nor my emotions have any control over that function. So let's work at that level. Hardwire preference utilitarianism into our AI so all decisions are evaluated through that, far below it's conscious processing. Wouldn't that accomplish your goals without involving emotions? Granted we don't know how to do that today, but we don't know how to give an AI emotions, or even how to construct one in the first place. But computer designers have always made decisions about how the low-level logic would work. Different computers have always evaluated some things differently, though only assembler programmers are made aware of it. Whether zero is positive, or something neither positive nor negative, is one example. That latter case can be useful, but it's also more expensive to implement. Now, if the first AI turns out to be an emulated living brain, then we're stuck with emotions. The idea frightens me, though. Give something emotions and it can become afraid of death. I know that many good humans, faced with imminent death, would in desperation sacrifice the whole world to live. I never want anything super-powerful to feel that way. But I'm an Asperger's type, so maybe I'm just not as comfortable with my emotions as the rest of you.

"Singularity" doesn't mean take over the world. It means change the world enough that people from before the singularity can't make sense of the society after, and could never have predicted that new society's problems. There was a "car singularity", though it's normally considered part of the industrial revolution. Consider the change within us that lets us use cars every day and ignore the fact that they kill over a million people a year. If the inventors knew they were creating what would become the new leading cause of children's deaths worldwide, do you think they'd have still done it? Yet we do know that and still use them constantly. Kurzweil sees an AI singularity coming. I'm not so sure, though when I checked his 1980s predictions against other futurists, Kurzweil was, by a scary-big margin, the most accurate futurist I could find. I can see we're at the end of the industrial revolution, and something new's coming along. But whether the dominant player ends up being AI, robotics, nanotech or genetic engineering, I have no idea. I just know it's going to flip our society on its head.

"Super steel" sounds good to me. Even burning the ion drive near Earth, you'll need a crap-load more solar power. But at least you won't need 100 crap-loads like you would to run it near Saturn. While falling asleep, I had this mental image of your rover on Titan, and a close-up of a methane snowflake delicately landing on the housing...and quickly sizzling into vapor from the temperature difference. I liked it.

Sounds like fun. One of my friends is a published SF author who uses me to debug his ideas. So here's the deal: I won't be offended if you reject my ideas and you won't get discouraged over my incessant nitpicking. Fair enough? For now, all I have to say is that isn't remotely enough solar panels. Sunlight at Saturn's distance is like 1% as intense as at Earth. That's why NASA used RTGs to power the Voyagers, and they weren't trying to run an ion drive. So, if you want to be realistic, we're talking a huge wall of thin-foil solar panels with a tiny space probe in the middle, like a spider in her web. Maybe leave that part in orbit, as communications relays for the landers? Alternatively, how about a small nuclear reactor? An ion drive's too big a job for most power options, including RTGs. It may actually be too much for solar power that far out from the sun. Hard to be sure; I saw an article just the other day where they'd made a solar cell that was only a few molecules thick. So you could get pretty crazy with light/thin solar cells and still be plausible. Maybe 3d-printed in space, over a cyanoacrylate spider web also deposited in space by a different robot? How's the rover powered? RTGs do sound practical there, and have the advantage of keeping rover's electronics warm enough to operate. That would be a big problem on Titan. I'm guessing multiple RTGs, since they can only be made in a very limited range of sizes. (What do you call an extra-large RTG? Critical mass) -180C is going to be hard on all the moving parts, too, particularly wheels. I really have no idea how one would build wheels and a suspension that worked longterm in that environment, or what they'd look like. Just don't give it inflated rubber tires. Have fun!

Nobody's called you on this, so I guess it was a memory glitch instead of a joke. Too bad, because I thought it was funny! Anyway, here's the history if anyone cares... Digital Research made CP/M, the dominant OS for Intel-based microcomputers in the late 70s. IBM made an appointment with DR's owner, Gary Kildall, to discuss licensing CP/M for the upcoming IBM PC. There are a bunch of apocryphal stories about what happened that day, ranging from "it was a beautiful day, so Gary blew off the meeting to fly his Cessna", to "Gary had never seen a non-disclosure agreement before, and refused to sign the one IBM gave him until he could talk to his lawyer". But whatever happened, IBM went away unhappy. Soon after, they met with Bill Gates to discuss licensing Microsoft Basic. At some point, IBM said, "Oh, and Bill? We're also looking around for an OS. You don't happen to have an 8086 operating system lying around, do you?" Bill replied, "We sure do! It isn't quite ready to demo yet, but will be in a month or so. Can you come back?" After they left, Bill went to a little local company, Seattle Computer Systems, who recently showed off their 8086 OS, a CP/M lookalike called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), at a Seattle Computer Club meeting Bill had attended. He paid them $50,000 to buy it outright. That became MS-DOS v1.0. Really. Digital Equipment Corporation, aka DEC, made minis and superminis, and had an excellent OS called VMS. But it wasn't just the OS; DEC made beautiful and elegant machines right down to the instruction sets. I've done assembler programming on maybe a dozen different types of computer. Nothing compares with a DEC, except perhaps a Motorola 68000...because Motorola stole about 2/3rds of the instruction set from a DEC PDP-11. Instruction sets aren't patentable or copyrightable. VMS wasn't their only great OS, either. CP/M itself was pretty much a simplified port of DEC's earlier TOPS-10 OS. Story of the 1970s: Everybody rips off IBM and DEC; cheap and unreliable clones abound. Then personal computers came along and turned the whole industry inside out. While IBM was busy taking over the market, DEC thought PCs were just a fad, and ended up bankrupt. Compaq (now HP) ended up with their manufacturing assets and Microsoft got the software, some of which ended up in the Windows/NT kernel. TOPS-10 -----> CP/M -----> QDOS -----> MS-DOS -----> PC-DOS \ -----> VMS -----> Windows/NT multitasking Thanks, mostly-anonymous DEC engineers! That's quite a legacy.

How about a blast from the past? The original Flash version of this video was the first thing I ever saw online that moved. I'd downloaded video clips and such, of course, but there was no YouTube and videos sure couldn't be embedded in a web page. But my friend Volare was just hanging out within his web page, singing and dancing, and left my jaw hanging open. I must have played this thing ten times that day, and eagerly showed everybody i knew.

I've always loved ATI's hardware. I even bought their original VGA Wonder card in 1987. But the drivers were total unusable garbage and I ended up returning it. And that's been the story of my relationship with ATI/AMD. About six times over two decades I'd get seduced by the hardware then run into driver issues that'd leave some of the fancy stuff unusable, sometimes never fixed during the life of the card. These days I don't even consider anything but Nvidia. They're boring when compared to the features ATI used to cram onto their cards, but I can actually use them. Maybe AMD management's straightened their software unit out. I've definitely heard they're supporting Linux much better, which would be nice. But I don't need to care anymore. When I retired my computers became commodities instead of my life. I even replaced my household Linux server with an appliance. Incidentally, Synology Diskstations are wonderful, rock-solid, and still run Linux underneath so hopefully don't cost me too much geek-cred.

And somehow they'll still manage to crash the actual hardware. :/

Dark City was wonderful in the theater, and makes me angry every time I've encountered it since. After the first run, they added that stupid voiceover at the beginning that's a spoiler for the main mystery of the whole film. If any of you are going to watch it because of recommendations here, please, please mute the opening voiceover. You'll have a much better time. - - - Updated - - - Now that's dedication. Respect. I love The Abyss, but think it should have been three different movies. A trilogy about the eventful careers of the Deep Core crew. Start with the survival movie where they get damaged by the falling crane and are cut off. Next, the military drama about the sub recovery and the Navy officer who goes crazy. And, finally, did you hear about that time they made first-contact with aliens?

Interesting, Northstar. I never heard of Escape Dynamics before, and appreciate you pointing them out. The big thing that stuck out for me was mention of getting their power from the grid. I've encountered beamed propulsion several times in hard SF, but think this is the only time they didn't have a dedicated power plant to handle most of the load. I've seen nuclear, stored hydrogen, and even MHD power from a static rocket engine, but never just loading the grid. How much power are we actually talking about? I didn't see that in either of the places you linked. Seems like it'd need hundreds of MW, and can one really buy that from the grid in 20-minute chunks? /If so, then can you also buy 1.21 Gigawatts for a couple of seconds? Doc Brown wants to know.

Great timing, Vanamonde! I finished a book right before coming here. Golden Age sounds like fun, and Mr. Wright just made a sale from your recommendation.

Here's where I get off the boat: "In an intelligence explosionâ€â€where the smarter a machine gets, the quicker it’s able to increase its own intelligence, until it begins to soar upwardsâ€â€a machine might take years to rise from the chimp step to the one above it, but perhaps only hours to jump up a step once it’s on the dark green step two above us, and by the time it’s ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps every second that goes by." How? Okay, I have a machine that's ten times smarter than I am. Since we're talking about the first superintelligence, this machine isn't a PC on a desk, but a large, expensive machine in a lab, comparable to the current supercomputer in the article, right? The AI has this burning desire to become even smarter. Now what? Answer #1: It's smarter than you are, so it'll convince you to upgrade it. -- Remember the part where it cost $390 million? It can be as convincing as it wants. I don't have the authority to spend $3,900 million to give it a 10x upgrade! There are a whole field of hurdles that have to be jumped to make that happen, and that process doesn't improve exponentially so is a barrier to how quickly such upgrades can happen. Answer #2: It won't cost more because the AI will design new hardware that's far better. -- But new superchips still have to be produced somewhere, so we have to design and build a whole new FAB facility, which takes years and costs several billion. Answer #3: It won't need hardware; it's the software that'll get smarter. -- Nope. Remember how individual techs grow in an "S-curve"? Well those genetic algorithms already optimized the crap out of the AI software long ago. There's a hard limit to how much a single CPU instruction can do. It'll doubtless have some innovative ideas like better RAM garbage collection, but those things will be worth single-digit percents, not orders of magnitude. Answer #4: It won't need a FAB because it'll first design a nanoassembler that connects atoms into whatever molecules and shapes are needed. -- Um, okay. But now our superintelligence singluarity handed us a nanotech singularity as a side-effect. Those are really distracting. Now that we have infinite resources to play with I don't really feel the need for a smarter superintelligence than you. Good job! We'll talk again when I get back from Saturn. Bye! ---- edit: I should say, I agree a singularity is coming. I see it too. But I think they gloss over this step in superintelligence scenarios. I see it being a much bigger deal.

I still have a copy I play sometimes.

According to Heinlein, it takes a physicist, three high school students, and some thorium... Watch out for space Nazis!

Get off my lawn, you darned kids! I listen to The Beatles, ELO, Yes, Jethro Tull, ...