Biology and medicine have long known that more advanced forms of life emit various forms of energy as they go about their business. Mammals emit heat as a byproduct of their metabolisms, and the electrical activity of the musculature, cardiopulmonary, and central nervous systems may be picked up by sensitive instruments and used for diagnostic purposes. Recently, researchers in Japan have discovered that human bodies also emit light in the visble spectrum, albeit in a fashion that most sensors cannot detect. In fact, most lifeforms emit visible light in some fashion though the mechanism behind it isn’t understood. This phenomenon appears cyclical in nature, like many of the ongoing processes of the human body – it peaks around 1600 and seems to be at its lowest around 1000 wherever you happen to be acclimated to. Of all the parts of the body imaged using single photon cameras the face appears to emit the most radiation. The exact mechanism underlying this phenomenon is still a mystery, though hypotheses involving free radicals are currently being bandied about.
In other news, two independent teams of genetic researchers in mainland China claim to have succeeded in re-embryonizing skin cells taken from lab mice and used them to grow clones of the originals. While China isn’t exactly at the cutting edge of stem cell research (then again, neither are the United States) they are known in the scientific community for taking the basics (for some value of ‘basics’) and pushing those principles to their limits – broad rather than deep knowledge, if you will. The article is a little thin on details but what it amounts to is they found a way to take existing, differentiated cells and coax them into somehow… the article isn’t clear if they got them to turn back into stem cells or not but they were put back into a pluripotent state and then grafted into early stage mouse embryos to see what would happen. As it turned out, in 27 out of 37 cases the re-embryonized cells contributed significantly to the development of the embryos and resulted in live mice with distinct germ lines. One of those mice was even able to breed with another mouse and spawn a distinct litter of young, which says a lot for how stable the mouse’s genome was (it’s unknown how many tries were made and how many successes there were).
The Cruxshadows have just released a music video for the song Immortal in their infrequent podcast, and I think it’s well worth the time to watch it even if you’re not a fan. While the Cruxshadows don’t seem to have gotten much videoplay (you’ll have to get a copy of Shadowbox to catch most of them, or you can just search Youtube), they do tell a good story with their videography. They’re working the black op angle again but with a decidedly transhumanist (or perhaps technomagickal) twist – the use of augmented reality overlays in the visuals is a nice touch and the CG adds to the imagery rather than replacing it.
I don’t want to give away too much but it’s a fun four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
If you want to download the video for your personal collection, plug the following URL into your download manager of choice (not a hyperlink to keep from slashdotting their web server): http://www.cruxshadows.com/cxspodcast/Media/immortal.mov
EDIT: If you want to read some of the reversed text in the video use your video player to mirror the video about the Y axis. I did it with mplayer like so: gmplayer -vf mirror=on ~/video/the_cruxshadows-immortal.mov
I got home early Tuesday afternoon after work and after taking care of some lifestyle maintenance (like synching my e-mail, filling out timesheets, and checking the backups) I got changed to hit the 9:30 Club with Lyssa and Laurelinde. We had tickets to see Ayria, the War Tapes, and VNV Nation who were playing an all ages show there last night (though technically the 9:30 is always all-ages). At the back of the closet I found my 40 hole Doc Martens, and discovered much to my chagrin that one of the boots is missing its lace, so I fell back on my old cycle boots. I need to either get a new pack of bootlaces or a length of paracord to get them back in service. At any rate we hit a local deli for a quick dinner and then hopped on route 66 east to take a shortcut through downtown DC (it’s faster than you’d expect around 1930 or so).
All things considered, the jaunt through downtown DC didn’t long at all, probably because most eveyrone who spends the day down there had already gone home for the evening. We arrived at the 9:30 and got our hands stamped about halfway through Ayria’s set. From what I could tell their set didn’t sound too different from the one they played the last time we saw them when they opened for the Cruxshadows during the Immortal Tour. Thus, I can’t say a whole lot about their performance other than their audio sounded much better and I’d like to get a closer look at their drumpads. Next up was the War Tapes, which seem to be a lesser known band from LA. I don’t know anything about them; to tell you the truth I hadn’t heard of them until the concert announcement a couple of weeks ago. From the songs they played during their set last night their lead and rhythm guitar lines are reminiscent of the Cure’s work from the 80’s and their lyrics remind me a little of the Mission UK’s. About halfway through I couldn’t help but wonder if some weird meta-cyberpunk fiction reality warp occurred because it felt as if we were actually at a Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns show from Snow Crash.
When I first started driving I taught myself how to navigate Pittsburgh by filling up my car with gas, picking a direction to drive in for fifteen or twenty miles, and getting thoroughly lost. I’d then spend the evening trying to get back home, or failing that, someplace that I recognized and could navigate from. I was thinking about that this morning as I attached a GPS puck to the roof of my car and ran the interface cable through the window. It’s been a long and busy couple of weeks, so while Lyssa was out and about today I thought that I’d spend a little time on the road wardriving parts of northern Virginia that I’d not seen before, just as I used to do in college. After a cup of coffee and a small breakfast I picked a direction, this time due west on route 50, and headed out to see what I could see. I got good and lost a couple of times in parking lots and side roads in Fairfax (no, really) because I found some roads that I’d never come across in my travels. After about two hours I packed it in, booted up my TomTom, and set course for home.
I had to let Windbringer cool down to safe levels because he was running flat out while inside a protective case. As a result I don’t think that I’ll be using him for wireless assays while running solo; I’ll start using my EeePC for that. Anyway, I’ve run some preliminary analyses on the data: it seems that the most popular channels are still channel 6 (457 access points), channel 1 (300 access points), and channel 11 (285 access points). I also found some strange channels which are apparently in use, like 64 and 36. I don’t know how this is possible but I could probably figure it out with a little research.
WEP encryption is supported by 936 out of 1,223 access points; another 297 don’t seem to support encryption at all, and 302 support some variant of WPA. Five APs advertise unusual crypto setups like WEP with TKIP and WEP with CCMP. 1,149 APs are configured to make use of the bands associated with 802.11b and 80 802.11n APs were found. 50 run at 40MHz and 30 run at 20MHz. Oddly enough the most common advertised transmission speed is 18.0 Mbits (510 APs), followed by 347 running at 54.0 Mbits and 201 offering 11 MBit speeds.
I’ve uploaded my Kismet data in the form of CSV, text, and XML files. I’ve also included a KML file suitable for importation into Google Earth generated by KisGEarth should you want to poke around the area by proxy. You can download the files as a ZIP archive here.
Disclaimer: I’m not responsible for what you do with this data. No, I won’t make packet captures available.
Implants in the human brain can be called primitive when considered in light of the organ they are meant to interface with. While the state of the art in technology uses minute electrical impulses to communicate with groups of neurons within the brain, the brain itself goes far beyond mere patterns of electrical impulses. Modern science has confirmed the existence of several score of neurotransmitters, and there are probably more that haven’t been identified yet. I’m willing to bet that there are other mechanisms underlying the operation of the brain that I don’t even know about because I’m not a neuroscientist. However, scientists far more erudite than I at Linköping University in Sweden and the Karolinska Institutet think that they’re on their way to developing artificial neurons which can communicate with organic nerve and brain cells using neurotransmitters rather than electrical impulses. They’ve developed a new plastic that releases certain neurotransmitters under certain conditions, and thus can communicate with selected synaptic groups at a time and not large swaths of neurons (which can cause misfires and thus what amounts to transmission noise within the brain) due to the selective nature of brain cells. In the next issue of the journal Nature Materials results of experiments in controlling the auditory cortices of guinea pigs with these new materials will be published.
The first logical step, I think, would be to improve the current generation of cochlear implants to correct certain forms of deafness, which are already fairly advanced. Cochlear implants are a well known technology and while they’re not exactly common they do see use. It wouldn’t surprise me if later versions of this technology were used to improve optical prosthetics, which are very limited in resolution and capability right now.
Something that’s fascinated me for a while (if you’ve been been keeping an eye on my blog for any length of time) is rapid prototyping, or the use of automated systems to build modular components by laying down successive layers of plastic, ceramic, or other materials. While the technology has not advanced sufficiently to make it truly useful to end users (i.e., your grandmother won’t be using one to make a new coffee mug anytime soon) it’s a subject of heavy development right now and the state of the art is advancing every day. For example, Will Langford of Tufts University recently used a Makerbot 3D printerto print out a pair of eyeglasses for himself. They’re big and clunky by design because they were inspired by the shades of such folks as Cory Doctorow and Bre Pettis but filtered through a first attempt. Langford broke the design down into seven basic parts, glued them together, and used paper clips to join the hinges. He says that his next attempt will be more lens-friendly (and thus more practical). If nothing else they’d make a great pair of safety glasses for the lab.
If you’ve ever been to Pittsburgh chances are you’ve seen the Grant Building in the center of the city. At night the beacon upon its rooftop can be seen from the highways which circle around the city and especially from the top of Mount Washington after sunset. For years it’s been known that the beacon blinks in Morse Code; folklore had it that the beacon spelled out ‘PITTSBURGH’ and probably most just took it as granted.
After much deliberation we've decided to name him Pigpen, after the Peanuts character. Pigpen seems to enjoy making quite a mess in his cage, from throwing everything that isn't nailed down around to kicking his food dish off of the top level of the cage. He also likes kicking bedding between the bars.
We're still trying to figure out how he produces more mass in poo than food eaten.
As if that weren't enough we've also caught him teaching himself to climb the bars of his cage and trying to headbutt the door open. It figures that we'd have a punk hamster.. I hope he doesn't hurt himself.
When I was a kid my mom and I used to drive out to North Park Lake in western Pennsylvania and spent the evening (and sometimes most of Saturday) sitting on a bench on the shore with a tackle box, two fishing rods, and a couple of dozen nightcrawlers from the gas station at the bottom of the hill. We never caught anything really newsworthy - at most a handful of panfish and only once a pair of rainbow trout, but we had some great times out there. Sometimes a flock of ducks would go swimming in the lake and we'd have to reel our bait in to keep them from going after the hooks, sometimes we'd watch a muskrat or two scratching around in the weeds along the shoreline.
I'm no sportsman by any means, but when my father-in-law proposed taking Lyssa and I out one weekend this summer to go fishing in rural southwestern Pennsylvania I jumped at the opportunity. I got rid of my gear a long time ago but Bill had a couple of fishing rods in the garage that we could use. So, after work last night we loaded a bag or two of stuff into the car and set course for southwestern Pennsylvania and Lyssa's parents' place, which is far enough off the grid that even Google Maps doesn't have a whole lot of data. It came as no great surprise that we got stuck on a ten mile stretch of the DC Beltway for better than an hour and less so that the one place to get a decent meal on route 270 barely had room to park. All told, we arrived around 2330 EST5EDT last night, checked our e-mail, and then caught a couple of hours of sleep.
Around 0645 EST5EDT this morning Lyssa got me out of bed and aimed in the general direction of the bathroom to take a shower, wake up, and attempt to make myself presentable. The general idea was to hit the hardware/sporting good store in town as early as we could to get temporary fishing licenses and then hit the lake before everyone else could to see what we could catch. As it turned out, 0730 was too early for the store to be open so we killed some time at the local supermarket by making a breakfast out of stromboli fresh out of the oven and crappy coffee from the bakery. By the time 0800 rolled around True Value was open and we spent some time talking with the owner, who's known Bill and Lyssa for years on end. I killed a little time prowling around the sporting goods shelves (which were stocked with the sorts of kit that you'd expect of a hunting/fishing/fixing stuff store in an old coal mining town) while Bill drove off to talk to someone the proprietor had suggested about fishing in the area. As it turned out, an older guy named Clyde is a friend of the store's owner and he let us fish in his private pond so long as we didn't keep anything that we didn't accidentally kill.
When I was younger and had more time on my hands I used to LARP a couple of times a month with House of the Unknown at CMU. We never really did anything terribly elaborate - I was one of the few who dressed up because my character was sufficiently different from me, but a lot of folks just wore whatever they happened to have handywhich suited. I also used to go to anime conventions and cosplay a bit, though I never really put the kind of effort into any of my costumes that most folks do. I certainly never did anything like this when I was younger: the Albion Workshop of St. Petersburg, Russia put on a massive game set in the world of Fallout 2. Approximately 300 people participated in the two day game and spent months beforehand converting an abandoned air defense base into locations from the game. A number of replica military bases were constructed, a couple of plotlines were written, and they seem to have had an excellent crew of storytellers managing everyone and keeping the story coherent. Just in case anything went pear-shaped they also had a squad of emergency medical services personnel on site. As you can see from the LiveJournal entry (untranslated from the original Russian) their costumes are nothing short of exquisite, their props would make any three cosplayers (to say nothing of the local police) turn white with astonishment, and the sheer diversity of game locations constructed is impressive. From the pictures you can see that they made a bar, a strip club (SFW), bunkers, the fringes, and they made good use of the old buildings and woodlands surrounding the site. The combat armor from the game looks great, and I'd love to sit down and talk shop with the folks who took part in the game. It looks like they even had a couple of NERO-style "I hope you can really pick locks" puzzles in the game.
I may be wrong but it's possible that they even had a wedding take place near the Silver Spring silo.
Awesome work, folks. I can't wait to see what you have planned for next year.
On Friday night Lyssa and I rounded up the usual suspects, and after a brief dinner at the TGI Friday's in Tyson's Corner Mall we stormed the movie theatre to catch the 2200 showing of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
I feel that I should state this up front: if you're looking for a deep movie that'll feed your head, this isn't it. It's a two-and-a-half hour movie about giant robots beating the hell out of each other. If you loved the cartoon as a kid, you'll be in hog heaven watching this flick. Shia LaBeouf reprises his role as Sam Witwicky, Megan Fox returns as Mikaela, and John Turturro is back as the slightly deranged Agent Simmons. The movie starts off with a skirmish between the Autobots and NEST (unit patch: "We'd tell you but then we'd have to kill you") against the Decepticons in downtown Shanghai under cover of toxic spill. It is at this time that we're given a taste of the scale of events later in the movie: the Decepticon called Demolisher manifests as one of the earth movers used to excavate the foundations of skyscrapers in excess of 80 stories in height... Also true to his word, Michael Bay brought in the character of Soundwave, and made him not suck, as promised.
Under the cut lie a more complete review and lots of spoilers. Caveat reader.
More under the cut...
Quantum computing, thought by many to be the holy grail of information technology, is based upon one of the basic tenants of quantum mechanics: a particle, be it a photon, a hydrogen atom, or a molecule of water, exists in a multitude of states (location, spin, orientation, what have you) until you actually examine it, at which time the particle suddenly 'picks' a state and stays that way as long as you're watching. At least that's the most commonly quoted interpretation of the math. At Yale University a team of scientists has created the first purely electronic quantum processor and put it through a basic set of tests. The quantum processor implements only two qubits but that's enough to search and sort an array of values. More's the point, this is the first non-trivial quantum processor built using solid-state electronics and not lasers and beam splitters. Each qubit isn't made up of individual atoms but molecules of aluminum which exhibit the same properties en masse for limited periods of time. By limited periods of time, I mean somewhen in the neighborhood of a microsecond. Not long, to be sure, but several orders of magnetude longer than the first qubits created ten years ago which lasted for a couple of nanoseconds at most.
I'd say this is most definitely a technology to keep an eye on. It's taken ten years to go from a single photon to a pair of (massive) aluminum molecules on a chip. Where will quantum processing be in another decade? And when will they leave the lab?
I've spent my free time over the past couple of days hacking away on my current project-slash-obsession and thus I've been doing a lot of reading up on microcontrollers, or at least the basics of them. Knowing nothing about them as a technology or about sound synthesis for that matter, I find myself having to start from first principles, which are never as easy as they seem to grasp no matter how much experience you have under your belt. I'm trying to design a synthesizer coming at it as a code jockey as well as a musician (or one-time musician, anyway). An A note in the fifth octave is 440 Hz, so you just push the value into a register, set a conditional that runs a few thousand times per second (at today's clock speeds that takes no effort at all) and play if a variable has a value, don't play if it doesn't. Sounds simple, right?
It's not. Playing nifty sounds is something that we take for granted but under the hood there's a lot of math and extra circuitry involved. That's why sound cards hitting the market in the early 90's were so amazing. When you hook a simple piezo speaker up with a pair of wires to a pin on a microprocessor and toggle that pin a few thousand times a second you can create sound with a method called pulse-width modulation, but that will make only one sound at a time. If it's polyphony you want you're going to need more oscillators, and in fact more hardware because PWM requires that the amount of time the pin is 'on' and the amount of time the pin is 'off' be precisely modulated because each note has a different combination of those two variables. You can't stack more than one sound if you're using PWM on a single microprocessor.
Not long after I decided to start working on this, I had the crazy idea of using a SIDuino, a microcontroller programmed to emulate a SID chip to perform the actual sound synthesis in this project. While I'm not yet ready to do anything of the sort I figured that I'd get an ATmega168 ready last night while I was at HacDC by flashing the code, labeling the chip, and putting it aside so it'd be ready when I needed it. So, I swapped the chips in my Arduino, plugged it into Windbringer, and followed the instructions for uploading the code into the 168. And bricked the damned thing doing it.
That is all the lint that was clogging the motor. I field stripped the carpet sweeper this afternoon and pulled it all out. Now it'll actually pick stuff up from the carpet.
This is the weblog of the Doctor, who is (in no particular order), a computer geek, a writer, a musician, a mystech, occasionally a coder, a traveler, an adventurer, and is interested in just about everything to some extent.
The Doctor's life is quite busy so he posts whenever the opportunity arises. It isn't as often as he would like.
in their infrequent podcast, and I think it’s well worth the time to watch it even if you’re not a fan. While the Cruxshadows don’t seem to have gotten much videoplay (you’ll have to get a copy of 
to catch most of them, or you can just search 
.
. It wouldn’t surprise me if later versions of this technology were used to improve 
") against the Decepticons in downtown Shanghai under cover of toxic spill. It is at this time that we're given a taste of the scale of events later in the movie: the Decepticon called Demolisher manifests as one of the earth movers used to excavate the foundations of skyscrapers in excess of 80 stories in height... Also true to his word, Michael Bay brought in the character of 
