Organ transplants are a fairly hairy aspect of the medical practice and are a crapshoot even with the best medical care money can buy. Tissue matching viable organs seems about as difficult as brute-forcing RSA keys due to the fact that, at the proteomic level even the slightest mismatch between donor and recipient (and there will always be some degree of mismatch unless they are identical twins) will provoke an immune response that will eventually destroy the transplanted organ unless it's not kept under control. Additionally, unless the organ is perfectly cared for prior to installation the tissues will begin …
I now have a contact page for the Brighter Brains Speakers Bureau. If you are interested in having me present on a professional basis, please look over my bio and contact me through that route. We'll work it out from there. Whoa. Is this what being grown up is like? Weird.
I've never really gone out of my way to publicize the fact that I'm a synesthete - my senses are cross-wired in ways that aren't within the middle of the bell curve. In particular, my sense of hearing is directly linked to my senses of sight, touch, proprioception, and emotional state. As one might expect, this causes a few problems in day to day life - I can't go to concerts without wearing earplugs because I shut down from sensory overload, and too much noise makes it nearly impossible to see (and thus, get anything done). The new office at work poses …
A couple of months ago, Amberite and I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California with his father. I'll admit, I wasn't sure what to expect on the way over there. I've been to the Smithsonian quite a few times but the Computer History Museum is just that: Dedicated to the entire history of computing and nothing but. There are exhibits of the history of robotics, video games, military equipment, and of course one of practically every personal computer ever made, from the Amstrad CPC (which never really had a large community in the States, though it was …
The reason I've been quiet so much lately and letting my constructs handle posting things for me is because I was getting ready to attend DefCon 22, one of the largest hacker cons in the world. It's been quite a few years since I last attended DefCon (the last one was DefCon 9, back in 2001.ev) due to the fact that Vegas is, in point of fact, stupidly expensive and when you get right down to it I need to pay bills more than I need to fly to Las Vegas for most of a week. I'm also in …
I feel obligated to make the following disclaimer:
Yes, I am still a privacy advocate. I still teach crypto and train people in using privacy-preserving technologies. I also still don't trust any service that I can't kick because data I produce through them is the product and not the service. That said, Google and Google Glass don't seem to be going away anytime soon. So, here are some of my thoughts on Glass.
If you've been bouncing around the consumer electronics set for a while you've undoubtedly heard of Glass, Google's foray into the red-headed stepchild of computer technology for …
I have other stuff to write about that will come in time.
I'll be presenting at the Global Existential Risks and Radical Futures Conference in San Francisco, CA on 14 June 2014. I'll be giving a talk entitled Echos Into the Past: Outbreaks of Future Technologies in the Present, about technologies that exist right now which the transhumanist community may wish to consider as first steps toward long-term goals.
If you've been following my website for a while you've no doubt read me yammer on again and again about 3D printers that can only use low-melting point plastics as feedstock for manufacture. Usually ABS or PLA plastic, because they're cheap and relatively easy to acquire. Joshua Pearce and his research team at Michigan Tech announced late last year that they've developed an open source metal deposition printer for fabricating tools and components for which plastic isn't appropriate. Their printer lays down thin layers of metal instead of plastic to build up much stronger objects. The total cost to construct …
