The Verge | I rode the ZBoard in Las Vegas and it changed my life
Read the article, this is what Kickstarter is all about.
This looks like a Blast, and useful practical
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Category Archives: Technology
What Should Have Been
Wired | The Common Space Fleet (1968) BY DAVID S. F. PORTREE 12.26.12 7:50 AM
Even as the moon landing was approaching futurists were looking to what should follow. They were looking at manned multi year missions based on the technology they had, reuse and incremental development of Apollo – Saturn technology. Just reading this article sent me of into a dream of what could have been. Just thinking about it made me sad, mad, glad: sad for what might have been, mad at those who sidelined the dream because of shortsightedness, glad that at least some had the sense to think-dream based on common sense.
Today Elon Musk and a few others are dreaming similar dreams maybe having read a few of the NASA documents though the basics are so common sense they do not have to have.
WIRED | The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse
An interesting discussion, at least for a futurist / SciFi writer.
If you know someone is x years old then you can know (generally) that they will almost certainly live y more years and will be almost certainly dead in z years.
However if you know a technology (defined almost as you like but embodying knowledge) is x years old then you can (generally) expect it to last at least x more years.
So as x gets larger Tlife gets longer but Plife stays the same…so aging, that is the rough measure of, age/life, is opposite for tech vs us biotypes… An interesting idea to roll into a story sometime.
iPad next?
The iPad is the premier tablet and it’s probably nearly the perfect size and weight for its form factor. That’s not to say that within the form factor there is no room for improvement. A screen that takes up most of the face should be a near term target, as should an auxiliary screen on the back face that provides bright light reading and low power / speed interactivity for those who don’t live indoors all the time. To support the iPad as a companion device, multi level security is a growing need.
Make the bezel the same on the iPad as minimal as possible (get rid of the push button) push the screen out to the edge, don’t change the shell size. This with continued pixel densification will put the screen on another level altogether. Make thumb and palm detection native and intelligent enough to enable me to rest my palm on the screen and write with a stylus as if the screen were regular paper.
Put an eInk reader panel on the back to enable the display of text and graphic art, this will enable high light low power reading applications and some other limited visual bandwidth applications such as phone etc. (This will be accomplished with a smart cover but it would be cool if it were integral with the iPad.)
The radio suite & battery life along with the camera, face time, GPS, and other built in sensors are probably good enough not to call for increases in size weight, but neither should they be decremented.
The iPad is far to big a part of many people’s eLives to leave to the pitiful protection it has today. We need multi level security, enable me to turn the iPad on as if there is no security for consuming web pages, playing games, and using certain apps. But for other functions use face recognition, symbolic coding other than a number pad, voice recognition, retina image recognition and even finger print recognition in combination to protect various levels of data in the unit.
Enable cyber security with one or more over watch processors that is not linked to the outside world for some level of checking to make sure that the tablet has not been compromised. A version of this ‘chip’ may be linked to a secure remote system (short-range) so businesses or organizations can disable certain functions of the iPad remotely to make sure that pictures, audio, or other data cannot be put into memory without authorization. This Big Brother functionality is a bit daunting but at least the over watch processor is probably going to be needed. The full BB may be an external attachment and not integral so one can shed it easily….
Additive Manufacturing in Space- Two favorites in One!!!
3D / Additive Manufacture in Space! Two favorites in one!
And its an SBIR…Small Business Innovative Research, program, how cool is that on top? The SBIR program is a personal favorite of mine. It basically provides entrepreneurs and engineers with ideas with funds to develop a concept and put together a prototype then helps them either commercialize it or work with a big company to bring to the market or to NASA, USAF, Navy, Army, DoE, DoT, DHS etc. When done right which NASA, the Navy and to some extent the AirForce and Army have done this can provide fantastic bang for the buck. Its only downside is that it can be seen as a substitute for bigger development programs and it’s not. SBIR works for initial concepts, for components, basic materials, small-scale projects (App scale maybe) but it’s not enough bucks to do anything major. The only program that does something similar on a larger scale is DARPA, which is also a world leading organization in this area.
On Thursday, NASA announced the selection of 39 proposals for Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II awards. …… Made in Space, a Silicon Valley company working on 3-D manufacturing in space.
Made in Space, Inc.
Moffett Field, CA
PROPOSAL TITLE: ISS Additive Manufacturing Facility for On-Demand Fabrication in Space
SUBTOPIC TITLE: ISS Utilization
Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) Begin: 6 End: 8
TECHNICAL ABSTRACT
Made in Space has completed a preliminary design review of the Additive Manufacturing Facility. During the first half of Phase 1, the design went through conceptual development, simulation testing, cost analysis, and comparison testing of which off-the-shelf parts can be used. The deliverables for Phase I include a written report detailing evidence of demonstrated technology (TRL 5) in the laboratory and will outline in detail the path taken toward hardware demonstration for Phase II (TRL 6). The preliminary design is ready to be manufactured as an engineering test unit in Phase II. A feasibility study was created to demonstrate what could be fabricated for the inside of the ISS (parts and spares) and for the outside (possible satellites). It is anticipated that many of the sample uses that the AMF will make possible on-orbit have not yet been envisioned.
Better Pharmaceutical Manufacturing via Continuous Processing | MIT Technology Review
Better chemistry: To produce drugs in a continuous-manufacturing method, MIT engineers had to develop several new pieces of equipment, including this reactor, which enabled a faster reaction and eliminated the need for a toxic solvent.
This is a big breakthrough, this is part of the maker revolution though a long way from maker bot. In the long run such a system can be miniaturized and stocked with a range of precursors which will allow a single system to produce any number of different drugs on demand. In the early days such systems will be huge and hugely expensive but will make drug exploration exponentially quicker and less expensive. In the long-term the system makes the whole pharmaceutical infrastructure we have today obsolete…except that it will probably increase the need for scientists, physicians specializing in individualized medicine, etc, etc. Old jobs go away new ones come on-line. And the new ones will generally be much more about the outer edges of technology and the connection between people and between people and their machines, instead of embedding people as cogs in the machines.
The article is pretty high level but a good quick read on the topic.
The Apple Machine
I think there is some weariness in regards to apple product intros these days, I sense that the press (in general { there have been folks who’ve kind’a felt this way for a while}) is actually beginning to feel a bit used by Apple (and they are probably right though they only have themselves to blame.) I feel the same way though I totally blame the press for not having the guts, smarts and knowledge to branch out more generally into tech reporting, there are vast areas of technology that are poorly covered and even ignored because they are boring old tech. Much of this old tech is boring because no one reports on it and promotes it like Apple promotes their products…making it easy for the press to hang on like lampreys.
Apple uses the press as an advertising amplifier, its one of the things that the other tech companies have either lost or never had the ability to do. It costs a lot to be a showman but it pays back, however its probably impossibly hard to quantify the cost or the payback to a financial guy before you go and do it. Jobs knew what he was doing and how to do it in his bones, and inculcated it in the bones of his legacy but the MBA’s hate anything that is not quantifiable…this aborts new ‘Apples.’ But even at Apple, without Jobs, there is a good chance that the MBA’s will chip away at the Apple marketing/sales/advertising/etc machine in the name of profits and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
eSpace Impulse
From Phys.org website a Kickstarter project for a scaleable pulsed plasma propulsion system. How hot is that?
The most Modern Of arts
A Merlin engine
Photo: Art Streiber
Wired
Sea Star indeed
Dornier Seastar CD2, developed by the son of the original Dornier and the grandson is now looking for venture capitalists to build it in the US. Designed for the Baltic and Oceania as a utility small airliner to provide access to islands and sections of islands with no airport but lots of water access. Normal 9 passenger 2 crew, up to 12 passengers. The latest seaplane designed in the world…hopefully not the last. Seaplanes are always beautiful in their functional ugliness and romantic (as in day dreaming of adventure) by nature.
This World and Others 