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Mar 4, 2014

Tears in Rain: The Case For Manned Space Travel

Posted by in category: space travel


By Harry Corlett — SpaceNews
Neil Armstrong is dead. The space shuttle program is no more. The Constellation program has been canceled, and the main spacecraft is a wheezy 50-year-old Soyuz. Our cosmic escapades feel distant. All those memories of daring men and women of “The Right Stuff” will soon be lost in time, like tears in rain, unless as a species we recognize the urgent need to venture to the stars.

On Jan. 31, NASA honored all the members of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia who perished while “furthering the cause of exploration and discovery.” Surely they would be devastated that their bravery and sacrifice might have been in vain as the great American pioneer flame gutters in the winds of political expediency.

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Mar 3, 2014

The Future of Scientific Management, Today!

Posted by in categories: big data, biological, business, complex systems, computing, economics, education, energy, engineering, futurism, genetics, geopolitics, life extension, physics, science, supercomputing

LIST OF UPDATES (MARCH 03 THROUGH MARCH 10/2014). By Mr. Andres Agostini at The Future of Scientific Management, Today! At http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

lba

Making nanoelectronics last longer for medical devices and ‘cyborgs’
http://www.kurzweilai.net/making-nanoelectronics-last-longer…es-cyborgs

Are you ready for the Internet of Cops?
http://www.kurzweilai.net/are-you-ready-for-the-internet-of-cops

Continue reading “The Future of Scientific Management, Today!” »

Mar 2, 2014

What’s Not Being Said About Bitcoin

Posted by in category: bitcoin

Brian Armstrong — TechCrunch

Mt.Gox is gone. The one-time biggest Bitcoin exchange closed its doors this week and filed for bankruptcy this morning. Questions about the future of Bitcoin have once again been up-leveled to the headlines of nearly every major media outlet.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a string of issues in the Bitcoin space, from the transaction malleability bug that ultimately closed Mt.Gox’s doors to a corresponding distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that delayed transfers on multiple exchanges and services. These attacks, along with recent phishing scams and money-laundering arrests, have cast doubt on the Bitcoin space and caused consumer panic — which is fair.

But what hasn’t been communicated well is how those who are truly invested in the future of Bitcoin remain totally confident, because with every attack, breach, and arrest, Bitcoin is getting stronger and proving to consumers and businesses it is not going away.

Here is what is not being said about Bitcoin that should be.

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Mar 2, 2014

Property investors to use space travel

Posted by in category: space travel

By Eduard Gismatullin — Irish Examiner

More than 70 individuals with a combined wealth of $200bn (€145bn) are investing in space projects including travel, Knight Frank said ahead of its release of The Wealth Report 2014 on Wednesday.

A suborbital trip from London to Sydney will take about two hours and 12 minutes or one-tenth the time of flying by plane.

Continue reading “Property investors to use space travel” »

Mar 2, 2014

Fleet of Toaster-Sized Satellites Will Orbit Earth, Provide Near Real-Time Monitoring

Posted by in category: space

— Singularity Hub

planet-labs-big
Silicon Valley sprung up on big open stretches of land where military installations had once been. Early semiconductor and computing businesses needed the space. But as Moore’s law progressed and mobile computing became the thing, the tech industry crept up into the seven-by-seven mile peninsula that is San Francisco. The city’s South of Market district is now nearly a strip mall of tech startups.

But tucked away in one of the neighborhood’s utilitarian office buildings is a technology company that harkens back to the early days of Silicon Valley: Planet Labs, founded by former NASA engineers, which builds satellites to photograph the Earth. Even so, the company doesn’t need a ton of space: Its satellites are about the size of a breadbox. The company recently recruited a batch of Stanford University students and built 28 satellites in 17 days in its cramped SoMa offices (pictured above).

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Feb 28, 2014

In Preparation For The Singularity, Tomorrow Is Future Day

Posted by in category: posthumanism

By — Geekosystem

futureday2

Tomorrow is apparently “Future Day,” and not just in the same way that today is present day. March 1st is an unofficial holiday for transhumanists, designed to “elevat[e]the human condition” and maybe help us prepare for the robot uprising.

Started in 2012, “Future Day” was created Ben Goertzel and Adam A.Ford of the transhuman nonprofit Humanity+ to engender conversations about humanity’s role in a rapidly changing world. Future Day’s website states,

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Feb 28, 2014

Are we already living in the technological singularity?

Posted by in category: singularity
Thinking robot

The news has been turning into science fiction for a while now. TVs that watch the watcher, growing tiny kidneys, 3D printing, the car of tomorrow, Amazon’s fleet of delivery drones – so many news stories now “sound like science fiction” that the term returns 1,290,000 search results on Google.

The pace of technological innovation is accelerating so quickly that it’s possible to perform this test in reverse. Google an imaginary idea from science fiction and you’ll almost certainly find scientists researching the possibility. Warp drive? The Multiverse? A space elevator to the stars? Maybe I can formulate this as Walter’s law – “Any idea described in sci-fi will on a long enough timescale be made real by science.”

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Continue reading “Are we already living in the technological singularity?” »

Feb 26, 2014

New partnership could produce a 3D printer that prints objects 500 times faster and 10 times larger

Posted by in category: 3D printing

By - Gigaom

George Miller's Stratasys Dimension 3D printer prints pieces for a cube puzzle. Photo by Signe Brewster3D printing is slow; so slow that printing an object several feet long is an arduous task that can take days. As a result, most 3D printers are tailored to printing small objects that take a few hours at most.

That could change for industrial-sized printers after the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and machine tool manufacturer Cincinnati Incorporated signed an agreement this month, 3Dprint.com reported today. The partnership will focus on creating a 3D printer capable of printing objects at 200–500 times the speed and 10 times the size of most current printers.

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Feb 26, 2014

A Telepresence RoboCop Piloted by Oculus Rift and Sensored Gloves

Posted by in categories: augmented reality, robotics/AI

Written By:

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Feb 25, 2014

Legal Heroin: Is Virtual Reality Our Next Hard Drug?

Posted by in category: virtual reality

— Singularity Hub
vr-helm
So video games are addictive—this we know.

It comes down to dopamine, one of the brain’s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as pleasure, engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take risks, or encounter novelty. From an evolutionary standpoint, it reinforces exploratory behavior.

More importantly, dopamine is a motivator. It’s released when we have the expectation of reward. And once this neurotransmitter becomes hardwired into a psychological reward loop, the desire to get more of that reward becomes the brain’s overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, widely considered the most addictive drug on the planet, does little more than flood the brain with dopamine and block its reuptake (sort of like SSRI’s block the reuptake of serotonin).

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