Tech Talk

The Babbage Engine: More family fun Silicon Valley style

2008-05-13T21:12:18Z

Ahh sunny California, where weekends are for ~~beach picnics and hikes among the redwoods and rides on cable cars~~ fighting crowds to see strange mechanical and electronic contraptions in operation. The first weekend in May I packed my kids into the car and headed off to the Maker Faire in San Mateo, where, after an hour sitting in traffic behind other geek families, we repeatedly watched a life-sized recreation of the game of Mousetrap go through its paces. Last weekend the big draw was the opening of the Babbage Exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where the five-ton 8000-part Difference Engine cranks through polynomial calculations. Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine, a.k.a. the Babbage Engine, in the 1800s, but never successfully built a version that worked. The working Engine displayed at the Computer History Machine is the second full-size working Difference Engine built (small models and virtual versions also exist); the first, completed in 2002, is on display at the Science Museum, London. Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and now CEO of Intellectual Ventures, commissioned the project. In a world in which computers are getting smaller and smaller, with little electrons whizzing around invisibly, there’s something satisfying about seeing technology that’s ]]> the Mousetrap game lumber down its track (photo below), the numbered wheels of the Babbage Machine turn with satisfying precision (see video above). The Babbage Machine will be on display for a year, and then it will become part of Myhrvold’s private collection.

Microsoft Brings the Cosmos to Your Desktop

2008-05-13T20:38:27Z

We are all stargazers. Anyone who has ever looked up at the sky at night has been fascinated by the beauty of the cosmos. Some go on to transfer that fascination into a passion for astronomy, either as an avocation or a profession. Astronomers have developed powerful tools to peer deeper than ever into the vast distances of the universe. These have been networked to provide the scientific community with the latest discoveries from telescopes around the planet, even in orbit. Now, the images they have recorded are available for stargazing on your personal computer. A team from Microsoft Research has launched a portal, still in beta, on the Internet called the WorldWide Telescope (WWT), where amateurs and professionals alike can take part in a social networking environment dedicated to exploring the heavens virtually. Users of the WWT (Windows only) can take guided tours of the universe led by professionals from some of the most advanced observatories in the world. Contributors can add multimedia slideshows to the WWT in much the same way they create PowerPoint presentations. The technology used to build the WWT is based on Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, which lets users pan and zoom through images. The company says that the WWT blends terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Web into an immersive experience.]]> Jim Gray, a former IBM and Microsoft computer scientist who won the prestigious Turing Award in 1988 for his work in database and transaction processing. He was a team leader on Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform, which enables users to create geospatial mapping applications. A boat Gray was sailing disappeared at sea 12 months ago and has never been found. Microsoft said it is releasing the WWT freely to the science and education communities as a tribute to Gray with the hope that it will inspire and empower kids of all ages to explore and understand the universe in an unprecedented way.

U.S. Energy Dept Sees High Growth Potential in Wind

2008-05-13T01:23:34Z

The U.S. Department of Energy released a report today, May 12, saying that the country could in principle generate one fifth of its electricity with wind by 2030. Assessing this purely hypothetical scenario, a DOE task force concluded that aggressive installation of wind turbines could significantly cut reliance on fossil fuels as well as greenhouse gas emissions at a total additional cost that would be equivalent to 50 U.S. cents per month per electricity customer. U.S. wind capacity is growing at a rate of nearly 6 GW per year at present, but to achieve a 20 percent generation share by 2030, wind capacity would have to be increasing by roughly 16 GW per year by the end of the next decade.]]> Europe’s recent experience. But the report estimates that addressing grid issues would increase the cost of wind generated electricity by only 11 percent. For wind to achieve a 20 percent share, given DOE’s expectation that electricity demand will be 39 percent higher in 2030 than in 2005, wind capacity would have to go from 11-12 GW today to about 300 GW—a staggering amount by any reckoning. But if the United States actually managed to do that, the added wind could reduce the power sector’s thirst for natural gas by half and its coal consumption by nearly a fifth. It should be noted, in this connection, that long-term projections of natural gas prices and supplies are highly uncertain, and that coal costs could be strongly affected by carbon regulation policies. That is, if natural gas prices turned out to be much higher two decades from now, or carbon emissions much more expensive, the impact of 20-percent wind could be quite different from what the report guesses. The report does not evaluate what the impact of stronger carbon regulation might be, but it does mention prominently that 30 states already have taken steps to limit carbon emissions and encourage greater use of renewables. Despite the clarity of its disclaimers, the DOE report is bound to be misunderstood and misrepresented. It is not a statement of policy, or an action plan, or even a recommendation. It’s just what it says: an evaluation of what the U.S. electric sector could look like if one fifth of power came from wind. It concludes that such a scenario is technically feasible and economically affordable. That’s all.

Out of Africa: New Broadcasting Tool

2008-05-12T17:10:49Z

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the emergence of a new generation of African film and television producers is the high cost of air-time. Most African cities still only support a few television networks (largely because of the reluctance of governments to permit more). And even these few networks often do not broadcast many hours, even in the capital (and even less hours in rural areas). A new technology is available – from a Silicon Valley startup named Qik – that permits real-time broadcast over G3 cell phones such as Nokia’s N95. Amazingly, these video-equipped phones can stream video live over the Web. While people so far have thought of the technology as a way to broadcast live events, Qik could also be used (and this is my idea to inexpensively broadcast pre-recorded material – or live music or theater performances – thus permitting artists and media creators in African to bypass a television network system that imposes unaffordable high “taxes” on them. The Qik technology is getting interest from both professional media and citizen journalists such as Ground Report. The chief technical officer and cofounder of Qik is a former Oracle engineer from India named Bhaskar Roy. Africa remains on the periphery of Qik’s radar but Bhaskar is enthusiastic about the socially-conscious and developmental benefits that the technology might deliver. He envisions an army of streaming-videomaniacs, using their cell phones to discipline rogue governments, document abuses against the powerless and instigate reforms in the delivery of public services. "By streaming human-rights abuses, people with cell phones can help stop them," Roy says. The technology is contributing to the rise of a "video advocacy" movement that is still on in its infancy in Africa, but is gaining steam elsewhere in the world.

Poll Finds U.S. Climate Concern Remarkably Unchanged

2008-05-09T21:48:08Z

Gallup Poll indicates that the proportion of U.S. citizens who worry a great deal about global warming is remarkably unchanged in the last 18 years: about 37 percent now, versus 35 percent in 1990. That, even much large numbers of Americans report that they are indeed concerned about climate change and consider themselves quite a bit better informed than before. Four out of five Americans consider themselves very well or fairly well educated on the issue now, compared to barely more than half in 1990.]]> Three out of five U.S. citizens believe that global warming has already begun, compared to less than half eighteen years ago, and 40 percent think it will pose a serious threat to their way of life in their lifetimes, compared to 25 percent in 1990. Even so, climate change ranks only tenth on a list of environmental problems that most concern Americans, and the fraction of the citizenry that advocates “additional, immediate, drastic action”—34 percent—is essentially unchanged from what it was when public discussion of the subject got going in earnest at the beginning of the 1990s.

Morgan Sparks, Creator of Practical Transistor (1916-2008)

2008-05-09T20:31:15Z

The man who turned the earliest transistor into a practical device, launching a revolution in electronics, has passed away at the age of 91 in Fullerton, Calif. Morgan Sparks was a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs when he was recruited by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley to help exploit a breakthrough circuit they were calling the point-contact transistor. Working with fellow AT&T engineers Gordon Teal and John Little, Sparks took the invention and fashioned a low-power variation on it that the laboratory dubbed the bipolar junction transistor, which improved on the work of the original trio of inventors, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the transistor principle.]]> press release issued Wednesday, the current administration at Sandia lauded Sparks as someone who was "a credit to the lab and, true to our mission, provided exceptional service to the nation." Tom Hunter, the current director of Sandia, said of Sparks: "Morgan was president when I was a young staff member at Sandia. He set the framework for Sandia to become a multiprogram lab. He was widely recognized for his ability to engage the labs in many new areas that proved to be important for our future." U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said of his passing: "Morgan Sparks set the standards for the professional, efficient management of Sandia National Labs. He recognized the future need to brand science into technology transfer, and he laid the groundwork to link defense-based research to applications that impact all our lives every day." Sparks is survived by his children: Margaret Potter of Waitsfield, Vt., Gordon Sparks, also of Waitsfield, Patricia Fusting of Fullerton, Calif., and Morgan Sparks, of Burlington, Vt. A memorial service will be held in his honor in Albuquerque later this month.

Fueling ARPA-E with oil company leftovers

2008-05-09T17:45:30Z

A lot of bureaucracies have been slapping their letter of the alphabet onto the ARPA bandwagon the past couple of years (HSARPA, IARPA). Late last summer, President Bush passed the America COMPETES Act, which included a provision to establish an Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy(ARPA-E). I think we should give the intelligence community all the cool new toys it needs, but I really think energy independence takes priority. Bart Gordon, the House Science and Technology chair who shepherded ARPA-E along the gruesome path of "house resolution" to actual law, is also beating this drum. Today, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Gordon had some sharp words for the people who are taking their sweet time establishing the new agency. One of the issues seems to be funding. Congress has repeatedly voted to repeal between $13 billion and $18 billion in tax incentives for the oil industry, but so far it hasn't happened. "I don’t believe the Federal government should be subsidizing an industry that is already seeing the highest profits on record," Gordon said. In the shadow of last year's oil company profits ($123 billion), $18 billion seems kind of anemic. But funding ARPA-E with that $18 billion would give it 6 times the annual funding allotted to DARPA, the original Advanced Research Agency. Just some perspective.

Maker Faire Highlights: Good ol' Moore's Law at Work

2008-05-09T15:51:30Z

In contrast to projects that were throwbacks to the electronics of yesteryear, some Maker Faire gadgets would be impossible to build without increasingly cheap and small microprocessors. Take John Maushammer's booth, for example. Last year, he managed to shrink down the video game Pong to wristwatch-size. You don't play the game yourself; instead, the computer inside plays both sides, scoring a point for the right every minute, and a point for the left every hour. Now, armed with a more powerful microprocessor, John is working on a watch version of the arcade game Asteroids. He's programmed the tiny ship to scan the screen for dangerous asteroids and shoot or avoid them before a collision. He admits that his code is better at playing the game than he is. Check out both watches: Another glaring example of how cheap microprocessors have become was the table dedicated to BlinkM, the smart LED. Each BlinkM is essentially an RGB (red, green, blue) LED with a microcontroller on the back. That means that you can easily adjust the color, hue and brightness of each BlinkM without using larger or more complicated microprocessors in your DIY projects. Tod Kurt showed off some nice BlinkM demos at the booth:

The Battle between Fear and Greed in the Nanotoxicology Debate

2008-05-09T12:49:20Z

There is no news topic more commonly covered in nanotechnology today than concerns overs its potential environmental, healthy and safety (EHS) impact. There are at least two reasons for this, I believe, one is that bad news or failure is always more compelling to read, and to write, than good news or achievement. And the second is that environmental activists are so much more adept and capable at manipulating the PR machinery than a gaggle of physicists, biologists and chemists. As far as the former reason, this blogger is as guilty as the next scribe, with the caveat that my ruminations on the subject have been with the aim to provide a little more balance to the issue. It appears I am not alone. Barnaby Feder at the New York Times waded into the controversy on his “Bits” blog and made the rather reasonable, but in today’s atmosphere nearly sacrilegious, assertion that “…nanotech skeptics, perhaps taking their cue from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, are going to war with the weapons they’ve got. With no evidence so far that nanotech is actually damaging anyone, they are focusing on the materials most widely used in consumer products and doing their best to worry the public –and government officials — about potential hazards that have yet to be thoroughly researched.” Uh oh… “no evidence that nanotech is actually damaging anyone” is not going to be taken lying down. A commenter on the “Bits” blog cites “evidence” from research on fish that disproves Feder’s assertion. In his defense, I am sure that Feder reserves the term “anyone” for those of the human species. But aside from indefinite pronoun confusion, the idea that tests performed on fish are conclusive evidence of nanotechnology’s toxicity to humans would be jumping the gun somewhat. There are a number of reasons for this, but not the least of which is that a big problem still persists in the lack of standards and measurement. As a result, two experiments testing the toxicity of nanoparticles may appear to be identical on paper but result in completely different results: nanoparticles are toxic, or nanoparticles are safe. But as I have argued before this debate will not be resolved by scientific inquiry, understanding and rational policies, it will come down to whether the environmentalists can incite enough fear to overcome industry’s drive to make a profit. In other words, fear and greed are the two battling forces, so no need to trouble yourself over “evidence”.

Another win for Blu-Ray: Neil Young

2008-05-09T10:45:18Z

In recent years, consumers have been all about video quality—digital, high definition, giant screens, high capacity disks. Audio quality, not so much. In fact, the move to compressed audio stuffed into iPods and other mp3 players and hard disks that act like home jukeboxes has continued the downward trend in audio quality that started with the move from vinyl record to CD. At least one artist has decided to do something about it. Rocker Neil Young is releasing his audio archives not on itunes, not as a multi-CD boxed set targeted at Christmas shoppers, but on Blu-Ray discs. Actually, a series of Blu-Ray discs, that will start shipping this fall. The discs will include archival video and stills as well as the audio ]]> Sun Microsystems JavaOne Conference; the Blu-Ray discs will use Java for interactivity. Of course, the vast majority of today’s Blu-Ray players in consumers hands are part of Sony Playstations; it’s not clear just how many Playstation owners are Neil Young fans. Could Blu-Ray, besides knocking out its high-def competitor HD-DVD, and perhaps, eventually, replacing the DVD, kill the CD business as well? After all, DVD-Audio and Super-Audio CD, both high fidelity formats, didn’t make much of a difference. However, if you figure that regular listeners will all move to digital downloads, leaving only the audiophiles purchasing round pieces of plastic, perhaps Blu-Ray will finally mean they can stop pining for vinyl. At least they won’t have to have a separate box in their home theaters for audio. And Neil Young and his fans will have shown the way.

Northwest Nuclear Smackdown

2008-05-08T21:46:28Z

The Northwest Compact just turned down Energy Solutions' proposal to bury some of Italy's nuclear waste in the fair state of Utah. Why is that important? Because it's going to set off serious fireworks of drama this summer. Just you wait. Here's the back story: Last fall, EnergySolutions a nuclear waste disposal company that's been accused of some shady dealings in the past, applied with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to import 20,000 tons of low-level nuclear waste (LLW) from Italy for burial in their nuclear waste dump in Clive, Utah. LLW isn't the bubbling containers of green goo of Troma Films. It's the lowest class of nuclear waste-- tissues you sneeze into on the hot side of the reactor; boots or gloves that have some contamination but not enough to merit disposal with high level waste. But still. It's other countries' nuclear waste, the ultimate NIMBY. And this isn't a one-time deal: EnergySolutions plans to make importing other countries' LLW its business. Well, Bart Gordon's head fell off. Gordon, who is chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, immediately introduced a bill banning all importation of foreign LLW. You can't blame him. This would set a terrible precedent for other countries that have no place for their nuclear waste, basically telling them that the western US is a logical choice for the world's nuclear waste dump. (It didn't work in Australia either.) The Northwest Compact is the federally mandated entity in charge of the Northwestern US' low level nuclear waste. Utah is within the NW Compact's purview. So, earlier today, the NW compact handily smacked EnergySolutions down. But here's the catch. EnergySolutions is a private company. As such, the company maintains that its private nuclear waste dump is not bound by the rules that govern the federally controlled nuclear waste dumps. So on Monday, probably anticipating today's outcome, they filed a pre-emptive suit. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, is letting people comment until June 10. (Over 1000 comments so far.) Then it will issue its own decision. If the NRC trumps the NW compact and rules in favor of EnergySolutions, there will be a huge catfight in Utah. If Rep. Gordon's bill gets passed, there will be a huge catfight in Congress, as all of the NRC appointees were put there by President Bush. They're not going to enjoy being told how to do their jobs. Stay tuned.

Nanotechnology continues its rush into consumer products while nanotech legislation slowly percolates through Congress

2008-05-08T18:57:46Z

Nano is hot. Apple isn’t the only one to call a product the Nano, there’s also a car by that name, and I have a feeling it’ll label more than a few kindergarten cubbies in a couple of years; forget Madison and Montana, what could be hipper these days than naming your little sprout Nano? We’re brushing our teeth with Nanowhitening Toothpaste, putting our kids in Nano-tex pants, fixing furniture with NanoGlue, smoothing our skin with Nano-Gold Energizing Cream, trying to lose weight by popping nanoSlim pills, and using some 600 other consumer products containing nanoparticles. (It’s amazing what people will buy because it sounds high tech.) That’s about a hundred more than existed last fall, when Spectrum authors Barbara Karn and H. Scott Matthews warned that research in nanotechnology safety is falling behind its commercial progress, and that the technology has the potential to be the next major environmental and health disaster. ]]> “The Power of Small,” produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and funded by the National Science Foundation, looks at the potential impacts of nanotechnology on privacy, security, health, and the environment. Check here for local broadcast information; broadcasts started last month and continue throughout May. You can also watch excerpts online. Spectrum’s reviewer says it could have been done a lot better, but at least it’s a start in building awareness. And it’s worth making yourself aware of at least the potential for risk, because nanotechnology continues its rush into the consumer marketplace. Last year, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, $88 billion worth of products containing nanoparticles were sold worldwide.The fastest growing category—health and fitness. The most popular nanosubstance is silver, carbon is in second place, followed by zinc, titanium, silica, and gold. In most cases, the nanoparticles are accepted by the consumer and regulators without question. Not always. In March, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency fined IOGear, a manufacturer of computer peripherals, for marketing keyboards and mice that purported to contain antimicrobial properties without registering the products as containing pesticides. Products with pesticides cannot be sold unless they’ve been tested to show that they won’t harm the user under normal conditions. IOGear stopped making the antimicrobial claims, though it didn’t necessarily stop using the nanoparticle coating on its devices. The U.S. Senate has begun to debate the future direction of its funding of nanotechnology research. In HR 5940, the National Nanotechnology Initiatives Act of 2008, it may strengthen the environmental safety and health aspects of the federal nanotechnology research program. After hearings in April, the bill was referred to the House Committee on Science and Technology, you can follow its progress here.

Maker Faire Highlights: Mechanical Mathematics

2008-05-08T15:48:43Z

Probably the most complex mechanical contraption at Maker Faire was the Computer History Museum's model of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2. Babbage began working on the idea for a mechanical calculator based on the method of finite differences in 1846, but he never actually built the device. The museum showed off a scaled down, table-top model at Maker Faire and demonstrated how it works.

If you're interested in the history of Charles Babbage and his work (both on the Difference Engine and his Analytical Engine, which preceded modern programmable computers), check out James Essinger's book Jacquard's Web. Spectrum editor Tekla Perry will have more coverage when the museum puts the full-size Difference Engine No. 2 on display on May 10th. The machine is 11 feet long and 7 feet high with more than 8000 bronze, cast iron, and steel parts.

Desertification Studies Cut Both Ways in Climate Debate

2008-05-08T15:43:06Z

For feelings of timelessness, unboundedness, and permanence, nothing beats the Sahara Desert. Yet as recently as 14,800 years ago, vast reaches of it were green, as a stronger summer monsoon enabled lakes, wetlands, grass and shrubland to expand upwards from the Sahel. Then around 6,000 years ago, with increased incoming sunlight and a weakening monsoon, desertification set it. But was that process fast or slow? Is it a case in point for those sounding alarms about “abrupt climate change”—change that takes place too fast for humans and ecosystems to adapt? Science magazine, with an accompanying commentary by Jonathan A. Holmes of the Environmental Change Research Centre at London’s University College, finds that the change in fact was gradual. S. Kröpelin of the University of Cologne (Köln) and colleagues studied sediments in Lake Yoa to extract information about pollens, salinity, and dustiness. “The continuous and well-dated pollen record for this site shows no abrupt change in vegetation in the mid-Holocene,” comments Holmes. “The rise in Lak Yoa’s salinity was rapid, but this was almost certainly a response to a local threshold being crossed as the lake changed from hydrologically open to hydrologically closed, rather than to abrupt climatic drying.” Last week’s Science (May 2) contained a report by Kiel University’s Lothar Stramma and colleagues reporting a different kind of desertification. Studying intermediate-depth waters in selected tropical ocean regions, they constructed a 50-year history of oxygen concentrations. What they found was that huge underwater oxygen-starved deserts are rapidly expanding.]]>

In Obama-McCain World, Is Carbon Regulation Inevitable?

2008-05-08T14:26:22Z

Republican presidential candidate John McCain cosponsored the first major U.S. bill to establish a carbon trading system, and the likely Democratic nominee Barack Obama is cosponsoring a lineal descendant of that bill. So it’s a foregone conclusion that we’ll have legislation next year regulating and cutting carbon emissions, right? Not necessarily, to judge from the degree to which criticism is rising, not just on the political right but on the left as well, of the mainstream approach to reducing climate change risks. a conference in New York where climate skeptics showed force. Many of them were sponsored by small research organizations of neoliberal complexion (to use the European lingo; in the United States, at least as far as economic theory and policy is concerned, we’d say neoclassical). In those circles, the idea of mandating carbon trading is seen as statist and almost communistic. Ironically, the carbon trading concept has come under considerable attack on the political left as well, to judge from a conference that took place a month later in New York, the Left Forum. Many socialists, it was apparent, viscerally dislike the idea of handing out emissions permits to big corporations that the companies can then trade, possibly for illicit profit. In one session, Karen Charman, the managing editor of a journal called Capitalism, Nature, Socialism argued that the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism—the rules that allow emitters in first-world countries to obtain permits to pollute by funding emissions-reduction projects in third-world countries—involves conjuring with imagined futures that corporations can shamelessly manipulate. When it was pointed out to her that her arguments were similar to those offered up by libertarians and climate skeptics, she said, irrefutably, “That doesn’t mean they’re wrong. For a sampling of left critical opinion about carbon trading, find the December 2007 issue of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, which contains a long scholarly article drawing attention to a huge dump in Durban, South Africa, which local anti-pollution activists sought to close but which now is getting a new lease on life under the CDM, with plans to capture and burn methane to generate electricity. The February 2008 issue of Z Magazine contained an article by Anne Petermann detailing attempts by organizations representing indigenous peoples to get their voices heard at the Bali climate conference last fall: “Carbon finance mechanisms [like CDM] result in forests being transferred or sold off to large companies who aim to acquire profitable ‘carbon credits’ at some point in the future,” a petition by the organizations complained. The Carbon Connection, a short documentary film produced by Fenceline Films in partnership with TNI Environmental Justice Project and Carbon Trade Watch, juxtaposes two communities, one in Scotland, one in tropical Brazil. Though utterly lacking in “production values,” not to mention context, narrative or analysis, the film vividly captures the essence of the left critique. In the Scottish town, a huge BP refinery continues to pollute, in part because it is able to obtain carbon emissions permits by funding reforestation in Brazil. But in a Brazilian community near where forest plantations are being expanded, water is diverted to feed the trees, leaving people who have depended on it for generations high and dry.]]>