Wired Magazine posted a interesting (if long winded) article about High-Powered Plasma Turns Garbage Into Gas. The nutshell version of this article is that a chemist, who used to work with nuclear waste, pioneered a method of reducing residential waste to a synthetic gas. The trash is then exposed to plasma (and an electrical current) which causes the atoms in the trash to merge with the gas to create a synthetic gas which can be burned as a fuel. Any atoms that fail to bond are then isolated within a glass structure. If the chemist who started this venture is right, we should see trash become reusable in the next decade or two as effectively renewable fuel.
I’m in a debate about Hard vs Soft science fiction, in my UCLA X455 English class (World Building for Fiction, Short Stories, by Alyx Dellamonica. While I’ve previously discussed this topic, the conversation forced me to refine my opinions. In the process of researching my position, I came across quite a bit of interesting (nearly current) journalism on the topic of suspended animation (cryogenics, cryostasis).
I, of course, started with Wikipedia (doesn’t everyone?) on the topic of Cryogenics… because honestly, I can’t remember the last story I read where someone was still putting forth the idea of suspended animation. While the science still looks feasible, we continue to run in to a lot of biological issues with attempts to perform suspended animation tests. But progress is being made (albiet slowly). In 2005, Pitts Safar scientists resurrected the hope of cheating death by showing conclusive proof that temperature induced hibernation extended the time doctors had to treat critically injured patients (by doing a series of tests on dogs where they chilled the body to 50 degrees and ex-sanguinated 40% of the dogs blood to simulate traumatic blood loss). In 2007, Dr. Hasan Alam was featured in a digital journal article about the race to be first to ‘hibernate’ human beings. While Dr. Alam‘s work was more focused on extending the time that doctors have to work on critically injured patients (just like Dr. Patrick Kochanek from the 2005 article above), there were scientists from UCLA looking at taking this research in to suspended animation, permitting patients to be placed asleep for extended (possibly indefinite) periods. Hibernation research received a boost in interest because of a Japanese man who reportedly fell down a well and was in hibernation (near death) for 24 days.
Most recently, Dr. Alam has been continuing his research, conducting suspended animation trials on trauma patients in Massachusetts. The article had a catchy conclusion: You’re not dead till your body reaches room temperature. What’s more, when combined with other modern research, it looks more and more likely that mankind will develop some kind of suspended animation technique in the near future. For instance, Mark Roth has a key to suspended animation: Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S), normally a toxic substance, in small quantities can bond with oxygen receptors and induce a state that will slow the biological self destruction that occurs at death (specifically it lowers the metabolism and reduces the need for oxygen, at least until it is removed.)
I happen to love TED, so whenever I get a chance to watch a new presentation, it’s a special treat. (I’ve not had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but I’ll watch it soon.)
If Mark Roth, and other scientists/biologists in related fields, are right, we may be looking at more and more clinical trials where trauma patients are put in to a state of suspended animation for transport from the scene of the injury to the hospital where they will be treated. The more common this becomes, the more information scientists/biologists will have about the effects of suspended animation techniques on the human body. The more information we have, the faster research will accelerate towards true suspended animation.
Ultimately, the problem is that no one healthy would voluntarily give up their limited lifespan (even if that total life span was only 70-80 years) to test for long term suspended animation. But, the rapid advances in suspended animation might allow someone to take extended cold-naps, drastically extending their lifespan (or even permit us to place someone in suspended animation for interstellar travel, or to permit a terminal patient to be stored until a cure can be devised.)
Imagine the potential benefit to terminal disease patients (i.e., cancer or HIV). Imagine one of the polar zones becoming home to giant tombs of suspended animation capsules, waiting for the day when they can be revived, their injuries mended, their diseases cured.
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The Sun aims a storm right at Earth: expect aurorae tonight! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.
Mon Jan 23 at 4:00 UTC (or Sun Jan 22 at 8 PM Pacific), there was a pretty spectacular solar flare. For the next several days we’re going to see an upswing in support tickets at work. In the last 48 hours we’ve had a few systems go down, power & environmental problems, UPSs burn out. This evening I worked on a site where a VPN router went down for no apparent reason. (All signs point to the network, but everything else on the network was working and the VPN router is directly connected to the internet… It was very perplexing.)
Whenever I hear about a solar flare, I’m sure there’s going to be more tickets in the work queue. If you read the FCC guidelines carefully (read the label on the box of every piece of electronics sold in the US), it says that all electronic devices must accept interference (even if it may cause undesired operation).
This device complies with part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) This device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference that may cause undesired operation.
via http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet61/oet61.pdf
And that’s what a solar flare puts out (large bursts of energy that can caused undesired operations.) In Sweden there were reports of the power grid being affected by the solar flare.
The picture is pretty, but it also means work.
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Writing Science Fiction is difficult at times. A common complaint is that near-term SciFi might predict that some technological breakthrough will have some social impact, but when the breakthrough happens the impact is minimal (or possibly even more significant than the author originally thought). For long-term SciFi (such as SciFi from the early 1900s, or something more recent like ”2001 Space Odyssey”), when predicting the future you get an increasing number of unknowns. For instance, it was speculated in the late 1960s that within thirty years we’d be building space stations and traveling through our solar system. We have the technology, but not the will (as a species) to make it happen. Charlie Stross’s latest article in the series on world building starts with three categories: Known-knowns, known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns.
- Known-knowns are things we know today: special-relativity, smart phones, SUVs, the 80/20 split in the adoption of most current-day products, etc.
- Known-unknowns are things like: We know that the three current-day major competitors for the smart phone operating system are: Windows, Android, iOS. (We could mention Blackberry, but they’re a niche player, much like Windows 7 OS for phones seems to be shaping up to be). Which of the major OSs will rule the smart phone industry is something we don’t know, but we know enough to pose the question.
- Unknown-unknowns (which is where he seems to spend most of his time in the article) are things we don’t know enough to predict. These aren’t things that are implausibly unknown, but are instead things that we simply cannot predict.
He then mentioned a fourth category, the “implausibly unknown” topics (like tachyons, alien invaders or telepath), about which he had this to say:
(I ought to add a fourth category of unknown called the “implausible unknown” — developments not compatible with the laws of nature as currently understood, or overturning major scientific paradigms. Tachyons, alien invaders, or telepathy all fall into this basket, and if you dumpster-dive it for ideas in fiction you are, at best, writing science fantasy.)
via World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary.
The difference between “soft science fiction” and “hard science fiction” isn’t the same as the difference between “science fantasy” and “science fiction.” Soft science fiction focuses on soft sciences, with the story more concerned with sociological, psychological (etc.) elements than hard sciences such as astronomy, physics, engineering. The difference between Science Fantasy and Science Fiction is a little murkier.
Arthur C. Clarke stated “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and Larry Niven conversely statement that “any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology”.
From this I conclude that the difference between Science Fantasy and Science Fiction is determined by the degree to which the author explains the science. The more detailed the explanations, the more rigorous the laws of science/magic presented within the story, the more the story belongs on the fiction side of the dividing line. I would add an exception that when an author posits a cause-effect scenario which violates a law in a hard science, the story is moved to the Fantasy side of the line.
The rest of Charlie’s article is interesting. It talks about how sociological changes are fractal, or repetitive, as they are based on the same basic building blocks (i.e., people). He predicts that, absent some external factor to upset the cycle, we’re likely to see another Great Depression late in the twenty-first century (2090+). I’d encourage you to give the main article a read, at least.
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A cognitive bias describes a replicable pattern in perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality. They are the result of distortions in the human mind that always lead to the same pattern of poor judgment, often triggered by a particular situation. Identifying “poor judgment,” or more precisely, a “deviation in judgment,” requires a standard for comparison, i.e. “good judgment”. In scientific investigations of cognitive bias, the source of “good judgment” is that of people outside the situation hypothesized to cause the poor judgment, or, if possible, a set of independently verifiable facts. The existence of most of the particular cognitive biases listed below has been verified empirically in psychology experiments.
via List of cognitive biases – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
I continue to educate myself, repetition breeds familiarity.
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Jan 112012
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World building 301: some projections – Charlie’s Diary.
I was first drawn to Stross when I read Halting State
Stross pays tribute to Bruce Sterling, when he says:
I always find these [state of the world discussions between Bruce Sterling & Jon Lebkowsky] fascinating, because Chairman Bruce is the pre-eminent thought leader of modern near-future SF.
Stross then goes on to opine what the future will look like in twenty years (2032), and again sixty years later (2092). I find Stross’ predictions fascinating because of a story idea I had (set in a time period maybe 150-300 years from now). Paradoxically, we are species that is able to produce individuals who give us truisms like “those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it”, while simultaneously being a species that is concerned only with our individual, tiny corner of the time-space continuum. Dystopian SciFi lately seems to be capitalizing on predicting some future utopia gone wrong, merging our ideals for a perfect future with the failure to learn from our past mistakes.
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Discover Magazine had an interesting article posted the other day about some research done to completely healthy patients. They put them under various (completely safe) anaesthetic and then measured their brain activities and asked them to describe the experience. Initial results suggest that a general anaesthetic leaves the patient conscious but non-responsive in 60% of those to whom it is administered. Since being put under (e.g., for surgery) but remaining conscious can be quite terrifying, any research which leads to reducing awareness during serious procedures sounds like a good thing. If, in the process of this research, we come to learn more about what part of the brain is actually responsible for consciousness, all the better.
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A friend introduced me to TED with an unrelated video, but I was so enamored with the videos I spent a day watching a bunch of them. At 10-25 minutes a piece, that’s a lot of videos. This one was my favorite. It talks about how we’re reshaping our world and our society because of our obsession with money and things. It has interesting social ramifications.
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