Brute Finesse

Here’s a few videos to tickle your fancy.  The first is a quick guide to setting up DNS redirects on a Windows 2003 server machine.  The second takes a look at the results but also points out a weakness in the system, namely that proxy sites will still be able to get around it.

Blocking Myspace with DNS

Getting around website blocking via DNS

It is hard enough to speculate on what technologies will be possible in the near future, trying to envision what will actually be made is significantly harder to manage.  There are a myriad of noisy, sing-song toys that burst forth from their respective baskets whenever my toddler decides its time to play.  Each uses technology to store sound effects, tunes and interactive components that would not be possible or practical without significant computing power available.

Trying not to inject opinion on what should be developed further complicates things.  However after a discussion with some religious friends I realized that I neglected a significant market share when considering what might arise down the road.  To that end this post addresses a bit of tech for dealing with religious belief and another for monogamy.

One could argue that neither of these belong in the future or that with truly civilized conditions there will be no need to preserve such anachronisms.  However I suspect that about 20 years or more will pass before the singularity and that leaves a big chunk of time for just such devices.

The first is simply called ‘Faith Bot’ and ironically could be used and modified to suit any brand of religious faith from Adventists to Zoroastrianists.  Heck it could even come in handy for atheists and agnostics with a little tweaking.

I should explain the intent of the device and why it should appeal to a niche market.  Religious views do not play a statistically significant role in decision making without priming.  Simply put, the difference in moral outlook may differ widely in theory but in practice religious types require ‘priming’ to yield statistical differences.  Keep in mind that individuals may be exempt from this but over a large demographic it is necessary.  Check out this article for a summary.

The added bonus is that it works for people regardless of faith.  How does this relate to technology?  Well it’s simple.  Faithbot is a source of frequent priming.  It doesn’t have to be a free standing humanoid, it could just be a small device like a pendant.  Heck you could even just create software to constantly send you text messages or dish out voice reminders or link to short inspirational videos.

Everything we need for the tech to exist already does, the problem comes from the possibility of stagnation.  Human’s acclimate to repetitive stimuli, we adjust and constant droning tends to get filtered out after a while.  To increase the effectiveness a variety of stimuli would need to be rotated.  The frequency of primes would also need to be randomized.  By adding user generated content to self and others the robustness of the whole system could draw from easily automated tasks to deliver the news.  The added benefit of personal contributions could add a nice touch every so often to know that your deity and your friends are looking out for you.

Again, I have no desire to see such a thing implemented, but others will have no problem roboticizing their religious views.
Next, we move on to Faithful Bot.

Consider the scenario as it plays out all across the first world.  You have been married for a few years now, life has fallen into a stable routine.  Things are cozy around the table and in the living room but downright tepid in the bedroom.  This presents a problem since humans tend to seek novelty in nearly every aspect of their lives.

I find it a little strange that we afford praise to those who have travelled extensively, developed a broad palette, dabble in innumerable arts and disciplines and condemn those who apply their curiosity towards their sex life.  Of course opinions vary but infidelity can be heartbreaking.  Merely getting along with someone for a few decades is sure to be a challenge.  Check out the current divorce rate if you don’t believe me.

In order to circumvent a length moral caveat I will only address the subject of preexisting monogamy.  To clarify this tech would be for people who are already together and want to stay together but realize they have needs that are not being fulfilled.  Some would argue that this is just a sign that the two people can’t make things work and should not be together in the first place.

I would argue to the contrary.  Novelty is a powerful form of entertainment and staving off boredom consumes the bulk of any first world childhood.  Expecting that to stop is naive but social norms present tough challenges and enormous guilt for even thinking of novel sexual encounters.  One could argue further that since people get bored with their spouses, even the good couples, that marriage is a poor institution but on this I will not speculate.

Technology is humanity’s bulwark and spear against the friction and enmity of nature.  It should help us, and helping out in the bedroom should not be shunned as taboo it should be embraced and explored.

To do this we will either need chemical or electrical stimuli.  If you have read almost any other post you’ll know that I favor cutting out the chemical middlemen and going straight to neurons.  Electrodes and electromagnets can shut off certain areas of the brain.  Consider shutting down speech. This technique is a bit crude and giant electromagnets are anything but romantic.   We will have to wait a few years for refinement but once significant control is achieved we can start tweaking specifics and start having fun.

I will assume that most couples begin with a more active and happy sex life than they end up with a few years or decades down the road.  Myriad factors contribute but at the root of the boredom lies a single person, changed but unchanged throughout the years.  How then can we reconcile a need for variety but also a need for monogamy.

Brain hacking could do it nicely.  Think for a moment of something distinctly non-romantic: Alzheimer’s Disease.  It’s an ugly heart breaker to be sure but this provides some template symptoms to build our Faithful Tech upon.  Namely, recognition of other people.  Eyebrows raise and beards are stroked at this point when we consider the following scenario.

You are lying in bed, unsure exactly how you got there, when a stranger, also naked, enters the room.  You can’t recall ever seeing this person before but they seem to be interested as they crawl into bed.  Forgetting that you are married you explore and interact with this person, ultimately culminating in a satisfying sexual experience.  Then the hack wears off and you realize the stranger that you are spooning is your dear beloved spouse.

Monogamy is preserved, novelty is acheived.  Everyone wins.  Now I know, put your hands down, lets not split hairs over intentions or whether its still cheating because you thought it was someone else.   This technology will be impossible to foist on someone without them knowing it and submitting to having electrodes planted in their skull (buy now and you get the free intracranial faraday cage to cut down on brain spam in public spaces.)

Now to address potential for abuse.  Yes this technology could be put to ill gains, yes if you know how to tweak things you could ultimately seduce a stranger by activating their hack and playing the role of spouse.  The trick will be to make it only work when desired with a single subject (or for the polygamists an exclusive shortlist.)

Comments welcome, as always.

Lets consider a few luxury food and beverage items and examine the chemical hoops that have to be jumped through to acheive them.

Risotto - Rice has to be cooked in such a way that it belches out its starches to form a creamy sauce considered to be delicious to most palettes.  This requires a very heat and labor intensive process.

Foie Gras - Requires force feeding of special geese ‘gavage’ to swell the liver to many times its natural size and become all fatty and delectable.  This is cruel to the goose and wasteful as many of the geese are raised for just such a purpose.

Saffron - Most expensive spice on earth.  Only grows in very specific conditions, current retail price of about 1,000$ per pound.

Kope Luwak - Most expensive type of coffee on earth.  Harvested from the turds of the Palm Civet after passing through digestive tract.  Enzymes do some chemical dirty work along the way imparting a smooth and apparently pleasant taste to the beans.

Aged Balsamic Vinegar/Red Wine/Single malt scotch - All of these things require sitting around in special containers for LONG periods of time.  As such supply has a huge delay and the good stuff always tends to be expensive.

What do these items all have in common?  Well, a lot of complex organic compounds that require meticulously controlled conditions to bring forth their particular flavors, textures and desirability.  Each and everyone should be duplicable with some chemical wizardry.

In the case of risotto, the simplest of these guilty pleasures, there should be a suitable hack to weaken cell walls of the grains in question allowing them to belch out their starchy goodness and cook more quickly to boot.  Some simple gene hacks ought to cover it.

Foie Gras requires unnatural conditions and dubious gastronomic punishment to be inflicted on the geese in question.  This one requires a two-step process.  First, some genetic jiggery pokery to produce big fatty livers without the need for force feeding.  Second, transplant these genes into ordinary chickens.  America consumes about 9 billion chickens per year.  If the foodies can settle for smaller lobes in larger numbers then we are all set.  I guarantee at least 7 billion of those chicken livers just end up in stew, compost or giblet bags that get tossed out.  Think of all the pate!

Saffron - I have often dreamed of growing my own Saffron garden and making a killing selling those tiny red strands en masse.  The problem is that you need about 150 saffron crocuses to yield a single gram of the elusive stuff.  Listen.  This is the 21st century.  We should not sacrifice ridiculous acreage of prime, highly organic, soils for such a pitiful yield.  Yes the spice contains a number of volatile organic compounds but they come from a miniscule portion of a finicky flower.  Hack it up, people.  Crack open the crocus genome and snip out the bitchy parts.  Easy money.  Well not that easy, but it is doable or it will be soon.

Kope Luwak - What a tragedy, luckily this one has an easy fix.  It probably won’t even require genetic tampering to complete.  All we need are…probiotics.  The chemical changes that occur via enzymatic action inside the bowels of the little beasties should be duplicable in other fruit eating mammals.  Figure out what you need, design a probiotic regimen and start feeding ripe coffee beans to bears or elephants.  Before you know it instead of having to order this over priced java over the internet they’ll be selling it at your favorite coffee shop and reaming you there instead.

The aged stuff - This one’s a little tricky due to the complexity of the reactions, the subjective experience and the need for good feedstock.  I like to think of aged liquids as a type of emergent metamaterial.  What prevents me from spending say, a couple grand on a bottle of fine old wine instead of say 8 bucks on some drek from Chile, is pretty self-explanatory.  However there is no magic involved here, its chemistry.  And if it can happen in nature, it can be industrialized.  Poor simulcrums exist for the cheap ‘balsamic’ vinegar you can get at the local gas station or the funky tasting non-authentic soy sauce.  There have to be better manufacturing techniques to get the desired results without all the waiting around for 30 years nonsense.  Gentle applications of heat, light, pressure and containers should be able to duplicate a good bit of the physical changes that should consequently impart the desired chemical changes.

Another solution would be massive scale trial and error.  Consider, you are a wine producer and for whatever reason you end up with a really damnable vintage.  I mean, everything is just plain off.  So you send some samples to your trusty chemical analysis for a good solid mass spec analysis.  The lab looks at what you’ve got in what quantities and based on its database can allow for corrections in the direction you desire.  Oh but where will it get parameters for the desired outcome?  From people, good ol’ fashioned default humanity.

Simple process, might be a pain to implement but I rarely let that stop me.  Take some wine/scotch/cheese.  Taste it.  Analyze what its made of.  Subject some of this stuff to various treatments intended to bring about chemical change.  Analyze again, taste again.  Rate the taste of each outcome and compare subjective taste to objective data.  Repeat a few million times (or with a large demographic of tasters)  Build up lots of data, discover the combinations of chemicals and viscosity for relevant grape type, sugar content and all that, and then you have a work around for bad batches of wine/scotch/cheese/vinegar.  From that point you can take raw feedstock of dubious quality, analyze it and see what needs to be changed to bring it in line with a more desirable product and then subject it to the necessary stresses.

Now if only someone could design software that could simulate human taste buds down to a molecule.  Oh well, that’s a post for another day.

Plastic Optical Fiber

Normally dealing with fiber optic cable is a mess because its stiff, fragile and handles corners like a shopping cart with a locked wheel.  However this has gotten me thinking about Subcutaneous Fiber suddenly the idea becomes a little more interesting.

The problems of running cable through a human body are easily imagined.  We’re already pretty extensively wired with nerves, bloodvessels, muscle fibers, ligaments and connective tissue and even bone.  I realize bone isn’t wire, its structural material but then again so is muscle, blood vessels etc.  It’s all infrastructure.

Now roads have been around and served a basic purpose for a long long time.  We think of roads as the realm of automobiles but for the longest time horses, wagons and feet did the most traveling work.

Existing infrastructure adapted to accommodate various other forms of travel such as bicycles, cars and trucks.  New features like road signs, traffic lights and on/off ramps were added and are now the norm.  Similarly human anatomy and physiology has adapted and changed via the erratic stagger of natural selection for millions of years.

However evolution works on group populations and individual changes occur only incidentally.  For individuals to increase bandwidth of nerves or rework our muscles to be more effective we’ll need technology to change.

I envision devices placed inside the body say attached to the mastoid process or grafted onto or inside the spinal column to aid thinking/reflexes/mentat computation or pretty much anything to assist the brain process information, act on existing information or communicate differently whether in situ or to exterior sources.

There are an awful lot of and/or’s in this post for a reason simply because the possibilities are limited only by human imagination.  We can probably upgrade that as well.

I wanted to reiterate the idea of radio based ‘ESP’ and in this case it should be MSP or Modified Sensory Perception because its not adding anything new only reconfiguring it.  The idea goes a little something like this:

Person A wants to communicate wirelessly across vast distances with Person B.  Normally a cellphone would work but circumstances prevent it.  Let’s say Person A is a quadriplegic and Person B has no fingers.  Each of these hypothetical (and unfortunate) souls is equipped with a Body Phone and has access to wireless ethernet.

Person A dials Person B via an intraoral control mechanism, sound is created in the vocal chords, transmitted to a nearby device and shunted through the ethernet connection to be recieved and responded to by person B.

Simple, easy, totally boring.  Let’s revise the scenario and bring in additional people.

Person C is incapable of any movement whatsoever.  They have suffered a type of mental degradation that prevents muscles from receiving relevant commands.  Person D is underwater and needs his mouth kept on a regulator so normal sound transmission will not be possible.

The solution - suck the information directly from the brain before it needs to travel.  When you vocalize or subvocalize complex nerve impulses relay info and you vibrate your vocal chords appropriately.  That information has to be processed by the brain and sent down the spinal cord for it to arrive.  This is just a way to shortcut that particular signal transmission.

So while again, its merely MSP it certainly seems like ESP.  You could even encode commands like ‘dial Person D’ into an interface that is handsfree in the best way possible.  Signals could be captured and fed into an external device that could be connected via cable or wireless and worn on the body.  Any additional crunching (like say converting raw nerve impulse into coherent sound) could be done once the signal has been captured.

This form of communication would certainly feel like ESP to the user because the same signals that transmit nerve impulses into sound could be used to pipe Person D’s response directly into the brain.  Such a breakthrough would be a serious boon to humanity since anyone with a functioning brain could use it.  What is more interesting is the next step of such technology.

Ask anyone and they will tell you that feelings happen in the brain or ‘the heart’ but not everyone realizes that all the sensations you will ever feel are possible not because of your eyes, ears, skin and nose.  They just send the signal and the brain processes it into meaningful information.  What this means is that having a way to convert and transmit sensory info would virtually eliminate sensory deficiencies like deafness and blindness.

Taking it a step further you could incorporate the interface into movies or interactive stories.  Visual cues are already powerful but couple them to perfectly reproduced sound and smell and burst of adrenaline at just the right time and you have the wave of the future.

I will probably expand on this idea more in the future and incorporate ideas about Modified Sensory Perception into future posts about Specutech in all its glory.  Look for a full post later once I can hammer out the details for solarscaping.

Let’s talk about a dream of mine, or rather a vision for future Specutech.  This is borderline Level 2/3 depending on tangential developments.  The goal of this post is to explore Automated, self-sustaining methods of drawing energy from the environment without the need for human support.  I will look at systems for land, sea, air and space.

There’s potential for purely airborne solutions, maybe blimps that can extract hydrogen gas from atmospheric water vapor and use it to maintain altitude while sucking down wind energy, but this solution is my least favorite.  I imagine the easiest way to build such a system would be to couple a relatively simple balloon array with the means to capture and convert water into hydrogen and oxygen coupled to something like the sky serpent.  However resupply and raw materials would be hard to come by drifting along in atmo so the need to land and resupply would be problematic.

Let’s focus on more down to earth solutions first.  For the pure earthbound solution to sucking energy life provides most everything needed.  This will be the most simple solution and may one day form ubiqitous networks of local power all over the world.

Here’s what we need: Solar Panels, 3D printing, and raw material for new stuff.  If you’ll recall the use of SIDR’s for home comfort you can extrapolate Semi-Independent Industrial Robots or SIIRs.  I have mentioned Nanosolar by name before and do so again because they are interested in widely distributed relatively small power plants to cut down on the need for high voltage transmission lines.  We will build on the model of the Municipal Solar Power Plant and make it self-repairing and self-expanding.

Basic concept involves a few square acres of solar panels spaced so they do not interfere with indigenous flora and fauna.  We’ll deploy at one square kilometer and leave room for expansion to fit existing terrain as needs grow.

The panels themselves are relatively cheap to produce via 3D printing and the SIIR’s are capable of setting up new arrays and gathering local material for feed stock.  Ideally a computer/computers would regulate and monitor the system much like our domestic model.  They could keep track of space, heat, broken panels and maybe even employ a kilowatt laser to keep the pesky crows away.  Once set up the system could grow and maintain itself simply by using a portion of the power produced to secure feedstock for expansion.  It would be tricky no doubt but once you have defined expansion parameters, suitable feedstock and sunny days then the system could run more or less automatically.

This all hinges on being able to extract raw material from the environs and produce additonal solar cells, SIIR replacement parts and maybe even additional processing power but there’s no reason why it couldn’t work.

In areas where solar power isn’t practical wind or geothermal systems might be adapted to better utilize the landscape.  At least geothermal stations could pull material from dirt and rock as they dig down in search of lava flows.

Let’s move our attention to the sea because this is my favorite bit of Specutech to date.  Before we begin let’s consider just exactly what the ocean is.

Climate varies and so do conditions but the ocean is a giant throbbing mass of saltwater being sloshed across the entire width of the planet by lunar gravity on a cyclical basis.  Wind, solar, and mechanical energy are all present and depending on the depth elemental feedstock could be purloined directly from the sea floor.  This implementation would not work in areas heavy with coral or endangered species.

Consider this illustration of tetrahedral spaceships. Link goes to original page.

This shape would be perfect for the seaborn system.  Imagine the above picture but using your human imagination place a solar concentrator on each of the three sides.  It will be easier if you imagine the view as a top down view of our Specutech bobber.

The central point will be facing up with a bloated gas bag supporting the structure and keeping it afloat.  Each of the solar concentrators is roughly 12 feet in diameter so the total size of the structure from tip to tip only needs to be 16 feet or so.  Size is important because at this ratio it could be cheap to produce thousands of these buggers and deploy them neatly along the coastal regions of planet earth.  (Outside of the major shipping lanes of course)

But what do these things do?  Well you’ve got three solar concentrators so they can pull power omnidirectionally from the sun.  Along the central spire you could attach a turbine for wind power alongside communications equipment.  This could also be a nice place to integrate the umbilicus.  What umbilicus you ask?

Well we’re concentrating solar and wind power so it has to be sent somewhere.  Before we progress let’s imagine what is going on below the surface.  Namely a means of extracting energy via the constant bobbing and swaying of the rig.  There are plenty of ways to go about this and I can only speculate on the relative merits of each but here we go.

• Each of the three pylons could be sitting on giant propellers that only spin in one direction to harness the brownian motion of the ocean.
• Similarly weighted stabilizers could have ratcheted gears to use the drag of water to generate electricity from stored mechanical energy.
• Direct current induction could be used by adding some magnets and coiled wire.  Think of the flashlights that you shake to power.  Here’s an example.
• The unit could ‘eat’ plankton and hapless fish as they pass by.  I know that’s a little grotesque but the energy and biomass are out there.

So while the unit is slurping down brownian motion and focusing the sun what else should it be doing?  Well since its got a relative tether it might as well have a water pipe connecting it to land.  Desalination takes a lot of work and its absurd that the human race anywhere suffers for lack of fresh water when almost 2/3 of the planet is literally covered with the stuff.

So you’re a poor nation with some coastal real estate.  The ocean’s going to be retransmitting absorbed wind, heat and energy from lunar gravity as long as the moon and atmosphere remain so why not put it to good work cleaning itself up for consumption?

What could also be nice about this system is that as you add units you could daisy chain them together to route water from the further units back to the closer ones and finally back to land itself.  You might even be able to suck energy from the varying tension on meshed umbilical lines.

Now we move purely into Specutech Level 3 and I won’t presume to say that I have added any new ideas to the existing pool but I have decided to dedicate the idea (due to complexity and length) to its own seperate post.  Here’s a teaser though:

Using a trio of spaceships equipped with some Von Neumann probes we could transform the solar system from possessing 7 inhabitable planets and one habitable rocky dwarf into a solar system with 3 habitable rocky planets and 3 habitable planets and 4 gas giants.  You’ll notice that we lose a planet in the process.

It’s Mercury, and part of the plan involves crashing it into Venus.  Check back soon.

Resonant Coupling may very well be what shakes me off the legs of AMD as I greedily hump the products of their proverbial leg.  Price/Performance is nothing to shake a stick at after all.  However if Intel can deliver on a new development well this could change not only my opinion of the company but indeed the world as we know it.

I’ve mentioned resonant coupling before but Read the rest of this entry »

Readers, just a quick update to a former post on Radiosynthesis, be sure to check out the updated article.  Link follows:

This is not a rick roll I swear to Buddha

After you’re done be sure to check out the link to Peter Watt’s stuff and read his books and send him money or cookies or catfood.

Also if you haven’t already check out the Links page and do some exploring.  Much more is sure to follow, and yes I know I have been slacking on the ‘More’ tags but I’ll clean it up today or over the weekend.  Also according to dear friend Matt at least one of the blag articles made it onto StumbleUpon.  Huzzah!

Your humble author has often tried to imagine a primordial world where human technology consists of mere flaked stones and sharpened sticks.  This is the planet where human life evolved and we literally started from scratch some thousands of years ago with nothing but our brains, our physiology and the absolutely non-metaphysical human spirit.

Fast forward to the present and the world is a far different place.  Just recently IBM and AMD created an SRAM cell with 22nm features.  For reference a human red blood Read the rest of this entry »

I always get a little bit giddy when I read a news story about something that I have speculated about and usually because it must have been going on for a while or its being implemented as you read this.  Here’s a few news articles and the articles I wrote or alluded to development.

V2V communication to reduce collision

Road Transport via Brute Finesse

Another example of location technology that could help in LPS situations.

There are a few examples that I want to add but haven’t been able to relocate so a new focus of the site will be to keep a closer eye and make better notes about precursors to Specutech and potential parallel developments.

My lovely wife mentioned that one of her patients on the oncology floor was an astrologer.  She touted out a few generalizations about how I was probably a workaholic, unhappy with my current job and highly intelligent.

I agree with the bookends of the description but I don’t hate my job, nor my hobbies, nor the fact that work excludes me from doing things I would prefer to do like write about Specutech or tinker with my various boxes before I turn them into money.  Thank you, Craig.

There were some other predictions named by this anonymous astrologer.  Read the rest of this entry »