Science, Technology & Health: November 2007 Archives

Got my CycloDS Evolution last night and it's awesome. Now I can watch movies, listen to music, and browse the web from my Nintendo DS. Sweet.

My friends are getting sick of hearing me talk about laser televisions, and now that their release has been delayed until at least January they're going to keep thinking I'm making the whole thing up!

Mitsubishi Digital Electronics, has told the television industry to expect a major laser TV announcement at a US trade show in January. However it will not say how long it will take before the technology goes on sale afterwards.

Either way the first laser TV was supposed to be in the shops in time for this Christmas. ...

The delay appears to be at the production side of the release rather than anything to do with the television technology.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a couple of other key component manufacturers haven't quite ramped up as fast as was expected," Wilkie said.

I'm still waiting and crossing my fingers.

BAE has developed a 32 megajoule railgun and is promising bigger and better:

The device operates similarly to previous railguns, using electric force to propel a nonexplosive solid projectile along a series of magnetic rails. The device requires a staggering 3 million amps of power to fire.

Incredibly, the device is only the initial offering from BAE. It hopes to soon meet the Navy's goal of a 64-megajoule weapon capable of being mounted on a warship. Such a weapon would draw a current of approximately 6 million amps.

With such high power requirements, such a design is technically feasible when placed on a nuclear-powered vessel. Dr. Amir Chaboki, program manager for Electro-Magnetic Rail Guns at BAE Systems, states, "The power is available. The challenge is how you use it."

Chaboki believes the ideal ship platform would be the Navy's electrically propelled DDG 100 Destroyer, which has an operating power of 72 MW, approximately.

Just mount mine on my flying car.

My brother Nick wonders how long it will be before we see Arnold wielding this in Terminator 4.

I bought a Roomba 4220 a week ago from Woot and it was delivered yesterday. It rules.

Only downside: while cleaning, the roomba can nudge light objects every so slightly out of place, which really throws off my OCD.

Walk fast, live longer.

Researchers who followed the health of nearly 500 older people for almost a decade found that those who walked more quickly were less likely to die over the course of the study.

The findings, the researchers said, suggest that gait speed may be a good predictor of long-term survival, even in people who otherwise appear basically healthy. The study was presented at a conference of the Gerontological Society of America. ...

The study presented at the conference reported that nine years after their gait speed was measured, 77 percent of those people described as slow had died, 50 percent of those considered medium and 27 percent of those considered fast.

Which is cause and which is effect? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that I walk "slow".

(HT: Nick.)

So some experimental data suggests that Asians are smarter than whites who are smarter than blacks, and Jews are smarter than everyone else. So what? America's Declaration of Independence proposes "all men are created equal", not because of their intelligence but because they are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". The rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" -- among others -- don't depend having a certain amount of intelligence, they depend solely on the endowment of God.

Wait, what's that? You don't believe in God, and you don't believe that our natural rights derive from him? Well then, what's your basis for blanket equality across the human race? If we're merely the product of evolutionary processes, they why should anyone stand in the way of those processes continuing and weeding out the branches of humanity that are "less fit" for our modern environment?

$999. That's how much it costs to have 23 and Me collect a sample of your DNA, sequence it, and analyze it for you. They then make it searchable for you through their website and keep the analysis updated with all the current genetic research. If I weren't sure the service would get cheaper over the next few years, I'd sign up right now.

Amy Harmon at the New York Times gave the service a try and reading her account gave me chills. I must know.

The scientist who invented the process of nuclear transfer and kicked off the embryonic stem cell fad has decided to stop working with embryonic cells because he says they aren't necessary.

Prof Ian Wilmut's decision to turn his back on "therapeutic cloning", just days after US researchers announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates, will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment.

He and his team made headlines around the world in 1997 when they unveiled Dolly, born July of the year before.

But now he has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryos, which he was awarded just two years ago, as part of a drive to find new treatments for the devastating degenerative condition, Motor Neuron disease.

Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University, believes a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells which can be used to grow a patient's own cells and tissues for a vast range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson's, and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as "nuclear transfer."

Considering that embryonic stem cell research hasn't led to any medical breakthroughs like adult stem cell research has, this seems like a smart move. Plus, you know, murdering babies etc.

Here's an article that gives a good overview of swarm intelligence, a key field of research in artificial intelligence. The emergent properties of biological swarms are fascinating and could eventually contribute to enhanced organization of both humans and robots.

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.

Iain D. Couzin, above, and his colleagues are discovering rules that allow swarms to work effectively.

Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.

Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.

“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”

There isn't anything new in the article, but for someone who isn't familiar with swarming it makes a good read. These sorts of group-intelligence algorithms will be particularly important for small, cheap robots, from unmanned aerial vehicles to spy bots to submarines.

(HT: Dan.)

Researchers are continuing to make progress connecting brains to machines.

Harnessing the electrical impulses of sight, scientists have built a robot guided by the brain and eyes of a moth.

As the moth tracks the world around it, an electrode in its tiny brain captures faint electrical impulses that a computer translates into action.

The moth, immobilized inside a plastic tube, was mounted on a 6-inch-tall wheeled robot. When the moth moved its eyes to the right, the robot turned in that direction.

I can't wait to have Google in my brain... as long as it serving up ads, I guess.

(HT: GeekPress.)

Technology that recently cost millions of dollars can now be built at home for a few hundred. I'm inspired.

(HT: hackaday and Gizmodo.)

Fascinating new results indicate that "overweight" people live longer than others.

About two years ago, a group of federal researchers reported that overweight people have a lower death rate than people who are normal weight, underweight or obese. Now, investigating further, they found out which diseases are more likely to lead to death in each weight group.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

Of course, the definition of "overweight" may be suspect, since it's based on the Body Mass Index which classifies muscular people as "overweight".

Researchers generally divide weight into four categories — normal, underweight, overweight and obese — based on the body mass index, which is a measure of body fat based on height and weight. A woman who is 5 foot 4, for instance, would be considered at normal weight at 130, underweight at 107 pounds, overweight at 150 pounds and obese at 180.

There's no information in the article as to whether or not the researchers attempted to differentiate between overweight people with excess fat and overweight people with lots of muscle. Is the latter category significantly large to affect the statistics? I've got no idea.

The DARPA Urban Challenge flew under the radar, but apparently the results are in:

Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing Team scored the first place prize of $2 million. Stanford University's Stanford Racing team came in second for $1 million, and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango team won the third place prize of $500,000. ...

Tether said Tartan's vehicle averaged about 14 miles per hour throughout the course, which covered about 55 miles. Stanford averaged about 13 miles per hour, and Virginia Tech averaged a bit less than that. In response to a question from the press, Tether said that MIT came in fourth place.

Tether couldn't have been more pleased with the race, calling it a "fantastic accomplishment," and saying that the technology for robotic vehicles was now just about ready for other companies and organizations to pick up the work in honing it further. "DARPA is an interesting organization," he said. "We really never finish anything. All we really do is show that it can be done. We take the technical excuse off the table, to the point where other people can no longer say 'Hey this is a very interesting idea, but you know that you can't do it.' I think that we're close to that point, that it's time for this technology to [be furthered] by somebody else."

DARPA is a great organization, unique in the world, and an enormous spur to innovation. Congrats to CMU! Wikipedia has some more details about the race:

The third competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge[2], known as the "Urban Challenge", took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Logistics Airport), in Victorville, California (Google map).[3] ...

The course involved a 96 km (60-mile) urban area course, to be completed in less than 6 hours. Rules included obeying all traffic regulations while negotiating with other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic. While the 2004 and 2005 events were more physically challenging for the vehicles, the robots operated in isolation and did not encounter other vehicles on the course. The Urban Challenge required designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other robots on the course. This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles. Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection.

I've spent way too much time at George Air Force Base, and it presents some interesting terrain, but I'd call it more suburban than urban. In any event, I bet this technology will lead to cars that drive themselves with minimal human guidance long before we have practical flying cars.

The conversation began on this post about how economic corrections are healthy but quickly diverged from the realm of finance into the more general realm of information theory. I'd recommend reading the comments there, but I want to post here my latest thoughts on the matter because I think they highlight a major reason that I'm skeptical about biological evolution.

Information is conserved, in a manner similar to energy and mass, except with losses over time due to entropy. Information can be thought of as the property that distinguishes useful energy from heat. To believe that biological life is due to evolution is to believe that natural selection and random mutations are transferring information from the environment into biological matter, with some loss due to entropy. (Due to entropy, there is an ever-decreasing amount of information in the universe.) This perspective reveals two difficulties facing the theory of biological evolution:

1. There doesn't appear to be a lot of information in the universe. There are a very limited number of physical laws that pretty much explain everything. We probably don't know all the laws yet, but I suspect if we did they could be contained in a single book. Cosmic background radiation exhibits almost no information whatsoever, for example. In order for information to be transferred from the universe to life through evolution, there must be enough information in the universe to start with.

Most naive experiments with evolutionary algorithms begin with a few simple rules and hope to generate complex results from them, but cannot do so. You don't get more information out of a system than what you put it, and you generally get less.

2. If there is a lot of information in the universe, where did it come from? This is a different question from "where did all the energy/matter come from?" because the presence of energy and matter does not necessitate the existence of information. As I said earlier, entropy transforms useful energy (with information) into waste heat (without information). Like our constant supply of energy and matter, our ever-decreasing supply of information came from somewhere, but where?

Random mutations don't net add information. They may increase information locally by moving it from somewhere else, but every transaction is degraded by entropy so in the net there's a loss of information. As with Brownian motion, the more interactions in the system the faster the whole tends towards the average. Contrary to the arguments of believers in biological evolution, longer time spans and larger populations actually make biological evolution harder to believe, not easier.

In my experience, information is never created without intelligence. I've never seen an example of a non-intelligent system that creates information, and I think the burden of proof lies with anyone who argues that it's possible. I'd even argue that, as a useful definition, an "intelligent system" is a system that creates information rather than just moving it from one place to another. I believe that God and humans fit this criteria, but I'm not convinced that any other systems or entities do.

Update:

There seems to be some confusion in the comments about what information actually is. Let's use an illustration. Wrote jez, suggesting a way that information might be created without intelligence:

7) a short computer program generates a continuing list of prime numbers

However, all the information required to represent every prime number can be written down in a very simple recursive form. Actually doing the work to process that function and generate a list of prime numbers doesn't create any new information. In fact, unless your list is infinitely long it contains less information than the function itself. My argument is that mathematics and the laws of physics encode all the information that makes our universe work. If biological evolution really happens, then the information must be derived from those sources. See again my problems with this theory, above.