Lucidtouch - a touchscreen device with sensors in the back

Here's an interesting research project I stumbled upon: Lucidtouch, for all those with fingers bigger than the Iphone practically allows for. This Microsoft device allows you to reach behind the screen to make selections...

...all these new developments and gadgets...yummy!

Folding screen for mobile phones unveiled

Read all about it here. Amazing as it may be, I have nothing further to add.

India's 9/11 >> Mumbai terror attacks

'Blasts rock Taj hotel as commandos try to end standoff' and 'Oberoi hotel cleared of hostages'; the news is breaking on CNN as I speak. Since I myself have been in Mumbai twice (very near the Taj hotel) and since I have enjoyed many tipsy evenings in the Leopold Cafe (one of the targets), I must say: Damn! As you can see to the left, one of the domes of the Taj is in full blaze. 9/11 all over again. What's intriguing to me (for lack of a better word) is the blogosphere. I've seen several interviews by CNN with bloggers. Of course, blogging has been here for a few years now, but this particular event, I think, symbolizes the extent to which 'the news-gathering-landscape' has changed over the last few years. The mountain of information out there is enormous; Although they're still shooting it seems every square cm has been filmed, taken a picture of, blogged about and what might not. I personally realized this once more when I saw the pictures below (thank you Arun Shanbhag).

You can see blood and a round serving tray. A waiter who was working in the Leopold Cafe was shot in the head when he was running out (with the serving tray in his hands). He fell down and died right there.

Also read: Mumbai attack aftermath detailed, Tweet by Tweet or check out Vinu's photostream

Moral Machines

An interesting article in the NYTimes on whether intelligent robots can behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can. Since there's quite a rush out there to develop battlefield robots that make their own decisions (South Korea and Israel already deploy armed robot border guards), several scientists are making the case that it is about time to start discussing issues like this.

“We don’t want to get to the point where we should have had this discussion 20 years ago,” said Colin Allen, a philosopher at Indiana University and a co-author of “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong,” published this month by Oxford University Press.

This might seem like a scary subject (probably because it is), but then again: how ethical do you think your average 18-year old is, after having lost several buddies? Check this out:

A 2006 survey by the surgeon general of the Army, found that fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents. More than one-third said torture was acceptable under some conditions, and fewer than half said they would report a colleague for unethical battlefield behavior

Maybe the question should be the other way around: Could we make robots as immoral as humans? An intriguing discussion, relevant however since technology develops so quickly. Personally I think we will get used to autonomous robots, just like we got used to airplanes and things like that. Of course there will always be flaws in the system. But how many flaws does the human system have?

Take cars that drive themselves. This is now possible. Since I am Dutch I find this a very interesting subject. Why? Because 10 years from now nobody will be going anywhere in our country. One big traffic jam! And the government doesn't seem very visionary. They are not building enough roads and they are not investing sufficiently in the public transport system. Bunch of dumb-asses! So, our roads will continue to fill up until things get so bad that the only way out will be to have cars drive themselves on the highway (this way you can fit many more cars on the same road because they will all drive at a fixed distance of each other and at the same speed). Of course, people won't want this. It scares us to think a car drives itself. Can I trust it? However, if you look at this from a national perspective: Currently, every year 1000 people die in Dutch traffic! One thousand! Personally I am not surprised. People are nervous out there! And give 'm a few seconds delay and they get pissed..

..Nah, I'll take a robotic system over your average emotionally confused & insanely impatient human driver any day now.

Machine condenses water out of thin air

Now here's an invention this planet needs, a new $1,200 machine that uses the same amount of power as three light bulbs that condenses drinkable water out of the air, up to 12 Liters per day! And of course it's clean;

'The filtration system ensures your drinking water will be clean and free of toxins and bacteria - more pure than tap water or even spring water'

Read all about it here or check out the product here.

A few thoughts: I am excited because this could, eventually, help many people around the world. Let's imagine this thing will be ten times cheaper ten years from now, because, as much as I'd love to own a machine like this, come on... $1200 is too much and last but not least, people in the Western Hemisphere easily use 300-500 Liters of water a day and that is, OBVIOUSLY, way too much. So as good as this machine is, consciousness is better. So next time after you've leaked no more than half a cup of pee into the toilet, ask yourself: does this justify flushing 20 liters of water through the toilet? NO! Next time you do the dishes, plug the sink! And next time you...

...oh darn, am I going crazy again? I can't help it though. I am the grandson of a preacherman...

And the Internet keeps growing

Thank you Google. Google has just announced it will disclose the entire Life Magazine photo archive (10 million pictures) in the coming months. This collection dates all the way back to the 1750's. The picture above is just an example as shown on the Google-blog.

...'Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol's "Saint George and the Dragon" in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt's camera'...

I've been browsing around myself. The picture to the left was made in 1862 in Antietam, US. It shows Maj. Allan Pinkerton, US Pres. Abraham Lincoln & Gen. John A. McClernand, in front of a pitched tent on the battlefield while the Civil War is taking place..

Just go to Google images and type something like this: 1860s US Civil War source:life

Lucky for us information addicts, there's more; Inspired by ancient Alexandria's attempt to collect the world's knowledge, the EU launched its Europeana digital library, an online digest of Europe's cultural heritage, last Thursday.

'The prototype launched Thursday contains around two million digital items, all of them already in the public domain. By 2010, the date when Europeana is due to be fully operational, the aim is to have 10 million works available, an impressive number yet a mere drop in the ocean compared to the 2.5 billion books in Europe's more common libraries. The process of digitalisation is a massive undertaking [Jarno says: Duuuh]' - check out the article here.

HaHaHa update: 'The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour). We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible. We will be back by mid-December' >> typical... :)

Atoms in motion

May 5, 1880. A reporter from the San Francisco Call nearly went nuts when seeing Eadweard Muybridge's latest invention: the zoopraxiscope (watch video above).

'After two years deconstructing the movement of animals with his pioneering freeze-frame photographic sequences, he was now able to reconstruct that motion to make a life-size horse trot across a big screen' - [read more here]

Back then it was amazing to see 'real life'-motion on a screen. I mean, wow, what's next. Well, better screens, and color, and higher-definition and faster motion etcetera. The ability to capture nature's movement on a screen, that's what it is all about. But since many things in nature are much smaller than the eye can meet, mankind came up with microscopes. So we can zoom in, and see what's going on. Up to now however, we haven't been able to build a microscope powerful enough to capture the movements of individual atoms...

And there we go: Now Ahmed Zewail, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has developed a way to do just that. Zewail's research team can generate movies showing the picosecond (millionths of a millionth of a second) motion of atoms.

John Thomas, at the University of Cambridge, UK, recently described it as a "revolutionary" advance that will change physics, biology, and material science. Check out the article here.

Further blurring of reality and fiction...

Thank you Stanford University and goodmorning planet Earth. My brother likes making home videos. He's just been to Cameroon for a month and so I am eagerly awaiting his latest compilation. The fun part of course, video-editing gets easier and easier over time. I've personally always thought that by 2015 we would be making our own movies at home (I mean, with special effects and all that). Well, Stanford University researchers have now brought that day a little closer by developing software that allows anyone to insert a video or still photo on almost any planar surface in an existing video and it's called '3D Surface Tracker Technology'. A mouthful I know, just watch the video above or read all about it here.

I knew it! I knew it! Evolution turns out not to be random.

I started this blog in January 2005. Without knowing why I should, but simply because I could, like millions of others. Before I knew it I wasn't only putting up links and an occasional picture, but I was actually 'writing'; Done that for about a year and then forgot all about it. A few years later and Jarno is back! (hi!). I've now decided to continue this weblog and post at least a few 'articles' each week. I tend to think I have two reasons for that. One: I like being busy with words, whether it is in writing or live, I've been verbally insane my whole life. It simply feels good. And then, behind the red door, what do we have Johnny? >> Reason number two: the impact of accelerating technological development on the human race (and the planet/universe as a whole).

I've always been intrigued by technology but by late 2004 I 'virtually ran into' this website. It's called Acceleration Watch. Acceleration Watch is an educational affiliate of the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF). The foundation's focus revolves around helping to understand and manage accelerating technological change. This is important because, as the term acceleration implies, things go faster and faster! And for us 'poor' humans that will mean it will get harder and harder to understand the world around us and this doesn't make decision-making easier (links to a Dutch article)...

...just have a look at the articles I've posted here the past 30 days. I can hardly believe my own stories... I mean ... erasing memories? A 0,05 mm screen? Robots that hunt down humans and Mr. Green Genes - the glow-in-the-dark cat! ...

Anyway, the Acceleration Studies Foundation was founded by John Smart, a 'developmental systems theorist', who's specifically intrigued by the implications of a hypothesis known in futurist circles as the technological singularity (see powerpoint slides above or download the entire presentation and once again: Thank you very much John). The idea is this: not only do things seem to accelerate, it all seems to move towards 'one point'. It's like spinning the wheel in a casino. Round and round the ball goes until it spins faster and faster in smaller circles. The location of the ball is completely random in the sense that I cannot predict where it will be after say, 3 seconds of spinning. What we CAN predict however, is where it will ultimately be - at the bottom (whatever the number). In the PowerPoint slide above (the Developmental Spiral) you can see how human development over time seems to follow 'that ball analogy'. Faster and faster, shorter and shorter, until we 'hit the bottom' (whatever specifically that will mean).

No we are not there yet, but we are definitely getting closer :) It seems this accelerating development curve/curse does not only apply to humans. Ever since this planet came into being 4.5 billion years ago things seem to have developed exponentially. Single cell organisms, multi-cell organisms etcetera etcetera. And now we are here.

Finally, my point: all the above cannot be true if evolution is purely random (or to put it differently: if evolution would be purely random, how come everything on this planet is getting more and more complex over time?). Since there is so much scientific evidence out there to back up this 'all encompassing notion of acceleration', apart from 'its randomness', evolution MUST also have 'some sense of direction'. Darwin is right, for half. You cannot specifically predict what species will evolve and disappear (Darwin was right about this), but just like that ball in the casino, it IS all going in one direction, towards ONE point (something Darwin didn't think of).

What a story. Halleluja, but Why, Jarno, why? Because this morning I ran into this article. Scientists of Princeton University have discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution. It turns out evolution is NOT RANDOM.

"The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a 'blind watchmaker'?" said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. "Our new theory extends Darwin's model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness."

"What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness. The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that's responding optimally to evolutionary pressure."

"Biological change is always driven by random mutation and selection, but at certain pivotal junctures in evolutionary history, such random processes can create structures capable of steering subsequent evolution toward greater sophistication and complexity."

Ha! I knew it! I knew it!

Message to my dad: Check out this walking device! ;)

It looks a little funny to say the least, but according to Honda, this (see video above) wearable walking device is as easy to use as a bicycle.

"It reduces stress, and you should feel less tired. To wear it, you put the seat between your legs, put on the shoes and push the on button. Then just start walking around. The system has a computer, motor, gears, battery and sensors embedded in it so it responds to a person's movements" - read all about it here.

Earlier this year the Japanese company Cyberdyne started renting out its exoskeleton for $1000 a month. That's cool because of two reasons. One: things are getting real. Now you can rent 'm, soon you can buy 'm. Two: is this company really called Cyberdyne? Does anyone remember Terminator II? ... 'Cyberdyne Systems Model One O One. Negative, the T One Thousand will definitely try to re-acquire us there' ... Reality starts feeling more and more like a movie everyday...

And the plot thickens >> more holograms

"While flat electronic displays represent a majority of user experiences, it is important to realize that flat surfaces represent only a small portion of our physical world," the team explains on its Web site. "Our real world is made of objects, in all their three-dimensional glory. The next generation of displays will begin to represent the physical world around us, but this progression will not succeed unless it is completely invisible to the user: no special glasses, no fuzzy pictures, and no small viewing zones."

Cool :)

From CNN Holograms to quantum ghost imaging

Well well well. Lot's of bizarre stuff going on out there. Seen CNN lately? They came up with quite a creative new way of bringing the news. I thought it was pretty cool myself. As you can see in the picture above, Wolf Blitzer and Jessica Yellin. Wolf Blitzer is real & Jessica is a hologram. Read all about it here.

If that's not crazy enough for you, what about this: The US army is 'pushing X-files tech development'. Example >> they are busy creating what they call self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging".

Uhm, come again? Well, just check out the picture below and then read the sentence again...

That's right. Imagine, poor suicide-bombers. Whoops, no virgins for you, you just 'blew up' a hologram. It's just not fair is it? You get filmed by robotic cameras, bombed by drones and when you finally find a real human being to get back at, he's not real. Yes yes, the Matrix is coming..

And no I'm not joking, This stuff is for real. They are working really hard on these virtual soldiers.

'We want to use massively multi-player online games as an experimental laboratory to see if they’re good enough to convince humans that they’re actually human, that can think on their own, have emotions and talk in local slang' - Dr. John Parmentola—Director of Research and Laboratory Management

Since I am Jarno it's quite easy to get me excited. I tend to think more often than not, that things go faster than expected. The statement above however, even to me, is a bold one. Because we're essentially talking full-blown artificial intelligence here. I wrote an article about that, two weeks ago, very extensive, in which I explain that I don't even believe anyone will be able to 'build' such a system by 2030 (there's a bet out there between two scientists that the Turing Test - the test for artificial intelligence - will be passed by 2029).

And that's just one part of the idea. Once the programs have been 'perfected' they want to deploy them (as you can see in the picture above, except for the fact that they won't look blue but real) by means of a technique called 'quantum ghost imaging' (pairing photons that do no reflect or bounce off an object, but off other photons >> I have no idea what that means).

Creating Artificial Intelligence and perfect holograms. And that's just ONE project. Several other projects they are CURRENTLY working on:

- Erasing bad memories

- Devices that will translate one soldier's thoughts into electrical signals that can be beamed to other soldiers

- Regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding"

Amazing.

Obama promises new era of scientific innovation

Goodbye to the current US ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Welcome back 'National Aeronautics and Space Council' (scrapped in 1993 by George Bush senior). And much more. Check out Barack Obama and Joe Biden's plan for science and innovation here (pdf). Or check out the technology agenda on the 'change'-website that was released wednesday November 05.

As The New Scientist puts it 'Whether or not Obama's scientific motives are to improve the world we live in, or to play science and technology catch-up with the other leading nations, the new US president has certainly been making the right noises for those that value science and technology. Now we have to wait and see if he can deliver'. So let's do that...