Synopsis:

The largest of these machines (imagined by and created with Kevin Costner’s $20 million investment) has the potential to process 210,000 gallons of oil per day (200 gallons per minute) out of ocean water.  According to rough estimates, over 1,200,000 gallons of oil per day are leaking in to the gulf.  BP has ordered thirty-two of these machines while the US government has not ordered any, despite the fact that Costner appeared before a House Committee on Science & Technology early in June.

Early tests seem to have flopped due to unexpectedly high consistancy of the oil being separated (allegedly the consistancy of peanut butter), but OTS has claimed to have put fixes in place to resolve the issue and are resuming field trials.  OTS goes so far as to make bold that their tests on the weekend of June 5-6 have been successful.  (An earlier press release indicates that testing began mid-May, but no claims of success were made for 3 weeks.  This is, presumably, the timeframe in which the early failures were evaluated and fixes were applied to the technology to adjust for unexpected conditions.)

During Costner’s testimony to the House Committee, Costner urged the house to legislate that machines like his should be mandated for all off shore drilling operations, much like life preservers are mandated.

Editorial:

My early concerns about claims that water is 99% clean harkons back to the fishbowl keeping days of my youth.  I learned very quickly that if you changed the water purity quickly (exchanging bowl water for tap water) the fish would die of shock.  I don’t understand the science behind this phenomena, but it’s real.

So the question I have is, is it 99% clean or 99% clean of petroleum?  The latter, leaving most other impurities/salt/etc. in the water strikes me as being the desirable outcome.  Cleaning the water of ecosystem killing oil, only to kill it with purified water does not seem like a great solution.

But, if this machine removes only the crude oil from the water, leaving most other elements in place (salt, etc.), this could be the wonder machine of the decade.

Source: Real-Time Rendering

According to the programmer, of the 60 languages on Earth that have been evaluated to write this program, all of them have a syntax which is mathematically similar.  Adjectives are near nouns; functional terms that bracket phrases.  Like “if” and “but” (which, when you think about it, are merely linguistic methods of describing mathematical or logical concepts.)  “If these, then this, else that” and “This but not that.”

It sounds a lot like the kind of code breaking that was done during World War II, and if the Germans had possessed something like this back then, they might have realized that the Navajo language used as a code by the Allied forces was in fact a language and not a code…

Likewise, if this program works as described, if we ever discover life in outer space, the odds are that this will help us to decipher what they are saying.

Who would have guessed that all of the imagination that went in to Star Trek would one day bear fruit in reality?

The re-post did have a few inaccuracies when retyped from the original article (which they fail to link to.  But a Google search finds a likely candidate.)  According to that article, practical applications are at least 10 years away (probably a little less if they didn’t account for the increasing rate of discovery.)

Still, the possibilities are quite interesting.  Not only can you remotely control human bodies once this technology is perfected (i.e., transmit my motor control signals to your body), but you could also bypass nerve damage and return motor control to paralysis victims, and remotely control prosthetic limbs (for construction, hazardous activity or even surgery.)

Today, as proponents of Fuller have previously suggested, we continue to see expansion on the work of a genius.  In Florida, they’re making Buckypaper which are constructed of Carbon Nanotube which are members of the fullerene structural family.  Essentially, these Carbon Nanotubes are built out of the same geodesic pattern that forms Bucky Balls, but instead of being formed in to a spherical shape, they’re formed in to that of a tube.

According to the scientists who continue to expand on the work named after Fuller, they discover practical applications of his utopian theories.  This breakthrough, if it reaches a commercial application, could result in new structural components for airplanes and cars that are significantly lighter and stronger (approximately 50 times stronger by weight) which means that in order to obtain the same structure integrity as current vehicles, we’d need only 2% of a cars current structural weight.  (A rough calculation: If we assume that a car is 1900 lbs and the engine and other internal components weighs another 1000 lbs, then the car structure could be reduced to 38 lbs and yet still maintain it’s existing structural integrity.)

I don’t know about you, but if you could reduce the weight of a car by a half ton, your fuel efficiency would go way up…  and, you wouldn’t need anywhere near as much horse power to propel your vehicle, so you’d end up reducing the weight of the engine to compensate for the reduced structural weight… which would only drive down the engine weight, the need for additional horsepower, and increase the fuel efficiency.

Plus, with current make engines, you could dramatically improve the structural integrity of a vehicle (making it safer) and still save on weight and fuel.

This is the closest any applicant has come to passing the Turing test since the annual testing started in 1991.

I think it’s awesome that our medical technology has reached the stage where we can pre-screen our children for life altering afflictions, and even happier to see that there are treatments available that permit us to cure those affected with terminal illnesses…  but I wonder about the morality of having one child to save another.

I’m not saying the couple shouldn’t have another child, and if they’re able to use pre-screening (which is illegal in Italy, the author of the article threw out that random factoid for no apparent reason other for dramatic reasons) to prevent the second child from being afflicted with the same disease and are lucky enough for that match to be a compatible donor with their first child, that’s great!  But I wonder about the morality of fertilizing dozens, hundreds or possibly even thousands of eggs, maturing them to the point where you can perform the screening and then discarding all those not selected.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-abortion…  but I’m not in favor of reducing the miracle of conception and life to something that is treated like a casino…  where you fertilize thousands of eggs and play the odds that one of them will be what you want.

And of course, there is the concern that by screening your embryos, you’re only a step away from a world where we select for physical, intellectual or emotional attributes instead of just eliminating health issues.

A reasonable solution might be to specify a limitation on filing patents.  If a researcher does not self-produce the object of the patent and make it available, then perhaps the patent should be made to expire sooner?

It’s hard for me to speculate as I know virtually nothing about the system, other than the broadstrokes reason for the Patent office’s existance.