In the Future….

So I recently have had the need to fix a couple of iPhone 3Gs.  It seems the face of them spider cracks a little too easily for a drop onto the a title or conreate floor. This is what one of them looked like.

One Busted iPhone.

And the after

Repaired iPhone

I haven’t really thought to document my repair of the iPhone but next time I do one I will take pictures for the blog. But I do have these.

This brings me to my point.  If you have a broken iPhone, that is if your front screen has a spider crack in it, and would like it fixed for a lot cheaper than apple wants get in contact with me and I can fix your iPhone. As long as the damage is limited to your screen I’ll be able to take care of you.

Hope I can help, because I know how devestating it is when you break your iPhone.

Happy Surfing and drop me a line if you need my help over at the contact page.

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-Chris

Say what you will about Obama, some people like him, some people hate him.  Me I think its still too early to make a truly well informed decision.  100 days is not that long ago.

However I do have to say that I am very excited about his commitment to Science.  Now he could back out or this could be empty rhetoric, which seems unlikly, but in my opinion this is one of the best things he could have done.  From basic Science comes everything that is great about the future so the better we get at itthe faster our understanding and advances will will come.

Here is a more detailed account on Discovery

So for as far back as I can remember I have always wanted a robot. My more impressionable years were filled with the likes of Johnny Five, RoboCop and Rossie form the Jetsons.  An odd combination admittedly, but none the less all robotic.

So my brother MattRock and I have decided to build our very own robot. He’s already named it Roomba 5. Building a robot is admittedly a big task and it maybe too big for Rock and I, but between the 2 of us we pretty much take everything apart and do stuff like this anyway, so whats to stop us.

This to the right is what makes the magic happen. But what the coolest part about it?  It’s actually made and sold by the same company that makes roomba.  They actually want you to hack and build your own robot out of the vacuum robots.  Probably the best and coolest business model I have ever seen. (I actually don’t know how it is as a business model, but it is defiantly the coolest)

So the first step, besides salivating and drooling over all the awesome things Roomba 5 is going to do for us, is to acquire the necessary parts.  The absolute bare minimum is a Roomba, a control box and a breakout board (if you want to wire anything else to the roomba, we do).

With these three parts we can begin to assemble and write simple code for Roomba 5.  I believe the first simple programs are C based.  Then latter on I believe we can install Linux Roomba 5.  Then the possibilities my friends are limitless.

Want to help?  Have cool ideas? let me know!

Done this before? Give me help…. please.

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BlackLight Power

So I have written about BlackLight before, and they have cropped up in the news again.  You can read the full press release at the end of the post.

I have been following this company for a few months now, and they are awash with controversy and stink of hoax. However, seeing as I on a personal level have nothing to lose, am hopeful.

BLP has managed to licence the novel energy source to two companies, both in the mid-west, both extremely small.  These announcements have actually changed my perception of BlackLight Power.  I scoured the net for a few hours to find out some reasonable information about these companies buying the miracle technology, but one has NOTHING on the net and the other one has not updated for many many months.

The novel aspect of the process has been independently verified by Rowan University, however nothing sustainable has been publicly demonstrated.  I feel this is why they can only get the small power companies, no real proof.

I hope I’m wrong, I like to be wrong, but I am getting a bad feeling about this one…. starting to smell like Bigfoot again.

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BlackLight Power Inc. Announces Second Commercial License with Farmers’ Electric Cooperative, Inc. of New Mexico

Non-Exclusive License to produce up to 250 MW of continuous power

 

Cranbury, NJ (January 06, 2009)—BlackLight Power (BLP) Inc. today announced its second commercial license agreement with Farmers’ Electric Cooperative, Inc. of New Mexico, (Farmers’ Electric).  In a non-exclusive agreement, BLP has licensed Farmers’ Electric to use the BlackLight Process and certain BLP energy technology for the production of thermal or electric power.  Farmers’ Electric may produce gross thermal power up to a maximum continuous capacity of 250 MW or convert this thermal power to corresponding electricity.  

 

BlackLight Power is committed to announcing all future progress as it occurs.

 

About BlackLight Power

BlackLight Power Inc. is the inventor of a new primary energy source and a new field of hydrogen chemistry with broad commercial applications.

BlackLight Power has invented a new primary energy source with applications to heating, distributed power generation, central power generation, and motive power based on a new chemical process of releasing the latent energy of the hydrogen atom, the BlackLight Process.

 

For more information, please visit http://www.blacklightpower.com/

 

About Farmers’ Electric Cooperative, Inc. of New Mexico
Formed in 1937, Farmers’ Electric serves rural consumers surrounding Texico, Clovis, and Tucumcari; and the communities of Melrose, Fort Sumner, Santa Rosa, Conchas Dam, House, Grady, San Jon and Logan with over 4,200 miles of energized lines.

 

Media Contacts:

Ramya Kumaraswamy

Hill & Knowlton for BlackLight Power Inc.

Mobile: 646-552-8639

Office: 212-885-0552

ramya.kumaraswamy@hillandknowlton.com

 

So here, FINALLY, is part 3 of looking at The Futurist’s list of top ten forecasts. Its been a tough couple of weeks but being as we are a few days in 2009 I figured I should wrap this up.

Forecast #6: Water will be in the twenty-first century what oil was in the twentieth century. Global fresh water shortages and drought conditions are spreading in both the developed and developing world. In response, the dry state of California is building 13 desalination plants that could provide 10%-20% of the state’s water in the next two decades. Desalination will become more mainstream by 2020.

While this senario is quite probably given our rate of comspumtion and our increasing demand, it overlooks one massive thing.  Oil is what Oil is today because of its scarcity and difficulity to extract, however water on the otherhand is abundant and easy to procure.  The problem is clean fresh water, thats no so easy to come by. But new techonologies like Dean Kamen’s water purifier will change that, water covers the vast majority of the planet, once we can make that drinkable this problem will lose some edge.

Forecast #7: World population by 2050 may grow larger than previously expected, due in part to healthier, longer-living people.Slower than expected declines of fertility in developing countries and increasing longevity in richer countries are contributing to a higher rate of population growth. As a result, the UN has increased its forecast for global population from 9.1 billion people by 2050 to 9.2 billion.

Trends may predicit these numbers, but there are external forces that will act on these numbers as well.  As more of the third world becomes industrialized will will see the precidted numbers from those countires start to slide.  It is a little bit counter-intuitive but as a population get more educated and industrialzed the birth rate tends to decline.  This could be from several factors, increased sexual education, more densly packed cities, less need for farm help.  However the coming dramatic increases in life expectance may blow both the high and low predictions out of the water, so this one is really too tough of a call to make.

Forecast #8: The number of Africans imperiled by floods will grow 70-fold by 2080. The rapid urbanization taking place throughout much of Africa makes flooding particularly dangerous, altering the natural flow of water and cutting off escape routes. If global sea levels rise by the predicted 38 cm by 2080, the number of Africans affected by floods will grow from 1 million to 70 million.

If the prevailing climate models are to be trusted Africans also have a growing worry about drought.  It looks like Afica is going to be one of the hardest hit places in the coming few years.

Forecast #9: Rising prices for natural resources could lead to a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. Not just oil and natural gas, but also the Arctic’s supplies of nickel, copper, zinc, coal, freshwater, forests, and of course fish are highly coveted by the global economy. Whether the Arctic states tighten control over these commodities or find equitable and sustainable ways to share them will be a major political challenge in the decades ahead.

The artic is warming up, making exploration possible.  This, rather than the rising prices for natural resources is the reason the rush is coming.  Even if the demand was low people would still cultivate the artic if they could, now they are starting to be able too.  However the bigger place to look to is the ant-artic, who knows what treasures like beneath that ice.

Forecast #10: More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities.Electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other noncarbon life-forms will make financial, health, educational, and even political decisions for us. Reason: Technologies are increasing the complexity of our lives and human workers’ competency is not keeping pace well enough to avoid disasters due to human error.

For years we have been giving more control up to machines.  Look at the new modern cars with crash avoidance systems.  It might not seem like a decision we are giving over but it is.  This is something that will slowley happen and most people will never even know it happened.  It is possible that a child born today will not have to worry about getting in a car accident when they get there licenece and they will never know the difference, its all a matter of perspecitve.

Well thank you for reading.  Dont forget to subscribe to the RSS feed so you dont miss any of my inane ramblings.

So here is part 2 of looking at The Futurist’s list of top ten forecasts.

Forecast #3: The car’s days as king of the road will soon be over. More powerful wireless communication that reduces demand for travel, flying delivery drones to replace trucks, and policies to restrict the number of vehicles owned in each household are among the developments that could thwart the automobile’s historic dominance on the environment and culture. If current trends were to continue, the world would have to make way for a total of 3 billion vehicles on the road by 2025. — Thomas J. Frey, “Disrupting the Automobile’s Future,” THE FUTURIST, Sep-Oct 2008.

I think this forecast overlooks the development and integration of advanced technology for the transportation sector that will fundamentally change how we view cars.  With the blanket WiFi and proliferation of GPS units in cars we will see cars become more autonomous and therefore more efficient.  With better systems and auto pilots cars will become more convenient than they already while reducing fuel consumption and traffic congestion.  I don’t see a paradigm shift coming until we get a better form of personal transportation.

Forecast #4: Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized. An increase in unusual college majors may foretell the growth of unique new career specialties. Instead of simply majoring in business, more students are beginning to explore niche majors such as sustainable business, strategic intelligence, and entrepreneurship. Other unusual majors that are capturing students’ imaginations: neuroscience and nanotechnology, computer and digital forensics, and comic book art. Scoff not: The market for comic books and graphic novels in the United States has grown 12% since 2006. —THE FUTURIST, World Trends & Forecasts, Sep-Oct 2008.

As a system grows it allows for more diversification.  With the majority of American high school graduates attending some form of college there is a greater pool of resources, and so to gain an edge it is easier to become a specialist.

Forecast #5: There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world’s legal systems will be networked. The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), a database of local and national laws for more than 50 participating countries, will grow to include more than 100 counties by 2010. The database will lay the groundwork for a more universal understanding of the diversity of laws between nations and will create new opportunities for peace and international partnership.— Joseph N. Pelton, “Toward a Global Rule of Law: A Practical Step Toward World Peace,” THE FUTURIST Nov-Dec 2007.

I wonder if this will cause problems with international treaties and/or induce a form of reform for extraditional offenses.

More next time.

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The magazine The Futurist puts out predictions around this time every year.  You can read about it here.

I figured instead of giving my own take, because that is way to complex of a task to stitch together my theories into one cohesive narrative, I would discuss each of top theories here and hopefully encourage some open discussion and really tease out the theories a bit.

So without further ado, theory one

Forecast # 1: Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030. By the late 2010s, ubiquitous unseen nanodevices will provide seamless communication and surveillance among all people everywhere. Humans will have nanoimplants, facilitating interaction in an omnipresent network. Everyone will have a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. Since nano storage capacity is almost limitless, all conversation and activity will be recorded and recoverable. — Gene Stephens, “Cybercrime in the Year 2025,” THE FUTURIST July-Aug 2008.

To me this theory seems more 1984 than 2030.  Sure all that ability will be there, but there has to be motivation to record everyone everywhere.  Sure most people think there lives are really interesting but most are not, and the general population is mostly too dumb to be subversive. 

Storage capacity advancement may very well mean we can store everything, but will we want to?  Not to mention that’s a lot of data to manage, and there will have to be people, systems and operations to maintain and pay.  Even with unlimited storage there will always be a cost to storing something, will it be worth any amount of money to store me sleeping for 8 hours?

Then there are also the people that just wont do it. Not everyone is happy about the future coming and there is still a huge part of our society that fears technology.  Within 22 years I don’t see a possibly of 100% adoption, that I would think, would take at least a generation.

This is also a matter of privacy, and there are some interesting questions that are going to start coming up in the coming years.  I wonder if we will head in the direction of a constitutional amendment dealing with privacy in some form? Or maybe the whole social meme of what privacy is will change.

Forecast #2: Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible. Emerging scientific disciplines (notably genomics, nanotechnology, and other microsciences) could pave the way for a bioattack. Bacteria and viruses could be altered to increase their lethality or to evade antibiotic treatment.— Barry Kellman, “Bioviolence: A Growing Threat,” THE FUTURIST May-June 2008.

And such is human nature that when we develop a tool we turn it into a weapon.  One can only hope that the same things that create the problem can also solve them. 

There is not much else to say about this prediction, we have been hearing for years about the use of bio-weapons.  Of Course if there are more of them out there that obviously means more risk.

That’s all for now, More to come!

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Solar Power!

In the future we will see the total abandonment of fossil fuels in favor or Solar Energy. Granted this may not happen in the immediate future but there are certain things about Solar Power that put in on the inevitable path in our energy future.  And certainly it will be an economic decision over everything else that truly takes Solar Power mainstream.  It costs nothing to mine; it shows up every day for free, all we have to do is learn how to harvest it.  Now I understand that at present day there are still large problems with solar power, and I do not express the naïveté that we will abandon fossil fuels completely any time in the next 50 years.  However there are great challenges being overcome every day and when these hurdles have been sufficiently knocked down we will have the ultimate energy sources we need.

So just what will it look like?

They say that enough sunlight hits the earth every hour of all of our energy needs for a year.  And so everything that is hit with light will become a potential source of energy.  This will start first in a smaller and more practical fashion in the personal arena.  Increases in efficiency and design will allow companies to build in solar cells to roofing tiles.  This company has already started doing it.  As we really refine the technology we will begin to see invisible solar power, where the integration of the solar cell has be masked by the traditional manufacturing process of the product. 

This will start to decentralize our power generation and massively ease the grid.  Another thing that will greatly decrease the strain on the grid is when our devices start powering themselves.  I know not charging my iPhone at night won’t really affect my eclectic bill that much, but if 10 million devices were no longer tied to our power grid we would see a massive load lifted it.

The electrical grid is still safe in its function throughout time I feel though.  Even with decentralized power you will still always have more power drain in areas than others and there will always be people that consume more than they produce, as is human nature.

This week a major development came out from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that may be a massive leap forward to the vision I have laid out earlier in the article.  The team has created a new anti-reflecting coating for solar panels that changes the way light interacts with Silicon, the main base of solar cells.  You can read the full article here.

The first thing that this new coating does is it allows the Silicon to absorb 96 percent of light as opposed to 67 percent that of untreated silicon.  An important distinction about this is that light absorbing is not the same thing as conversion efficiency.  This new material is basically just harvesting more sun to be converted, which will increase the net output.

The second unique property of this new coating is that it changes the angle at which silicon absorbs sun.  Traditional Solar panels work best when pointed direction at the sun, every degree off angle the sun becomes the solar cells lose efficiency.  With this new development Silicon is absorbing light at all angles which will increase the net output in much the same way as the absorption.  But a major factor of this property is that now motors can be removed that currently tracks the sun along the sky, while still achieving maximum efficiency for a fraction of the cost.

So what’s next?

Well solar still has quite a way to go, but the biggest hurdle it seems is that the sun does not shine at night.  And the answer I feel to that is better forms of energy storage.  The energy is going to be abundant but how will we keep it?  That’s a discussion for another time, but the guy over at ultracapacotrs.org seems to have a few interesting ideas you should check out.

So there is this company called BlackLight Power that I have been following for several months and let me tell you it is definitely an interesting company.

The founder Dr. Mills has been at this since about the 90s. And he claims that the accepted theory of quantum physics is for all intents and purposes wrong.  For you non physics and chemistry types he is claiming to be able to get massive amounts of energy out of hydrogen atom by dropping the energy levels below its accepted lowest level, the ground state.  In essence squeezing blood from a stone.

Without evidence or proof I would just want to throw this guy out on his ear.  But this week folks from Rowan University independently verified some very interesting results that BLP has been claiming in there studies. They found energy that has no current explanation in the current model of physics.

Mills claims to have built a prototype using this technique that generates 50kw of continuous energy only using water as fuel.  Now its important to point out that the Rowan team only observed spikes, not continuous output, but that the part Mills does not want to give away, because that is the BlackLight Process, which I’m sure he is convinced will make him lots of money.

BlackLight has been around for a long time as I have said, and has taken lots of hits as “quackery”  but it still stands because of and in spite of the persistence of Dr. Mills.  Mainstream science’s problem with Dr. Mills theory is that he claims to create “hydrinos” which are hydrogen atoms with this extra energy sucked out of them, which should be impossible with what we know about the world.  However it can clearly be seen by this research that something is going on (assuming this is not another Bigfoot debacle). So his persistence may just pay off.

One point of interest is Dr. Mills has a theory that hydrinos could account for dark matter because they do not react the same way with light.  And if you think about it that kind of makes a little more sense than dark matter as some exotic material taking up lots of space.  But who knows, lots of people call him a crackpot, only time will tell.

Make your own decisions, here is all the press, make up your own mind.

Black Light Process

Rowan University Paper

Black Light Press Release

The Future of Medicine, The Human Genome

I saw this really great article the other day.

So in the early spring of 2009 a company called Complete Genomics is claiming that it will offer, for 5000 dollars, the complete sequencing of an individuals DNA.  The current cost for that is closer to 100K, even up to a million, so we are looking at a major drop in the cost.  At 5000 dollars it becomes economically feasible, unless that is the economy stays the way it is.

Now how they do it and what the advances are is all very technical, but this article does a good job of describing it.  In 2009 they will only sequence 1,000 genomes, that number will raise to 20,000 in 2010 and further from there.

The potential benefits of this are huge.  If for nothing else than it will increase the amount of information scientists have to study.  With every person that opts to get their Genome sequenced we will achieve a broader cross-section of the human populations genetic make-up.  And therefore we will have a better understanding of how all this stuff works.

But beyond that we will now have advanced screenings for diseases that we have never had before, and cures for crazy ones that still mess us up like Alzheimer’s.

This company is one of many that will rise soon that will shift the focus of world health care from a reactive stance to a proactive one.  And really that makes sense, why would you wait to get sick?  What was that my mother always said? “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”

This is the Future.
This is the Future of Medicine.
Enjoy. 

-Chris