New Hobbit Trailer

If you hadn’t heard yet, Peter Jackson decided to shoot the new Hobbit movie in 48 frames per second. Such a bold new adventure in film making and story telling demands a captivating trailer that no one can ignore. Thus, with the help of legendary actor Leonard Nimoy, a brilliant new clip has emerged….

 

That’s right fools. You just got TROLLED!

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The Plasma Age

The proliferation of new technology in the 21st century has wielded substantial paradigm shifts in the way people communicate. Genetics has been revolutionized with whole genome sequencing in a matter of days. Robotics and nanotechnology have started making an impact but the full swing of those technologies is still far from being reached.

Presently however, I’d like to present a new period classification, the Plasma Age. It turns out that this term has been used before to describe the proliferation of lasers from laboratories to personal electronics. Plasma (as in ionized gasses not the bodily fluid) has steadily been increasing its presence in our society. The most obvious example is the Plasma television. (Although due to their limited lifespan I am an LCD fan.) What I propose however, isn’t the age of small plasma based devises, but a host of industrial scale plasma technologies. Stars like our sun have a corona of plasma that burns at a million degrees. Seeing people use plasma in engineering application is a bit like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

Ad Astra recently tested a novel type of engine dubbed the VASIMR “rocket.” However, this engine is not a rocket in the standard use of the term. An engine like this could never generate enough thrust to get a craft out of Earth’s atmosphere. Rather, this is one of the best designs of an ion thruster for travel in the frictionless vacuum of space. Just like you wouldn’t use a coal-steam engine to power an airplane, you wouldn’t use this technology to escape Earth’s gravity. This system or something similar could be the ‘railroad’ technology of the space age. The design operates by using a radio frequency chamber to turn gas into ionized plasma. This is then sent through a cylotron and propelled outward at high velocity. It is cited that the current Ad Astra designs could shuttle an astronaut to Mars in only 39 days.

Let’s do a 180, there are other uses of Plasma out there which are much more down to Earth. Consider using a plasma incinerator to convert garbage into fuel and extract precious rare earth metals from old electronics. Pioneered by a group of entrepreneurial engineers working at the Hanford nuclear cleanup site; this system converts waste material into fuels and chemicals. Plasmagasification heats material up to 10,000 degrees celsius, converting organic waste into ionized gas and differentiating solid material for use in recycling. This is the technology that will eliminate landfills. It does produce a synthetic hydrocarbon fuel, which when oxidized creates greenhouse gasses; but this can be used as an alternative to dangerous natural gas fracturing techniques. Moreover, this fuel can be converted into pure hydrogen instead. Solid materials output from this process can be used as building materials and in our roads; and rare earth metals which are in high demand for solar panels, smart phones, and any other type of electronics.

Here’s a cool video of one of the groups doing this plasmagasification:

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Open Diablo Beta

Image via pcgamewallpapers.net

Blizzard hosted Diablo III open beta last week.

They opened up to do stress testing on their servers; allowing a limited beta for the weekend of April 20-22. I played through two and half times, trying out a few of the different classes. I started my first game as the wizard, which I later regretted. Let me tell you why.

I hardly remember the bad old days of Diablo II, I was in junior high school then. The most recent Diablo style RPG I played was Titan Quest. I actually really liked that game. The levels were well done, the different varieties of armor, the bosses were challenging but not impossible. It was enough like Diablo to lure me in and not so much of a clone that it left a horrible taste in my mouth. I played through it specializing as a barbarian, it was pretty awesome. He could grow to 30 feet tall and charge opponents at full sprint using a shield smash. Some enemies were troublesome, but beating them up face to face was awesome.

Then my girlfiend started playing as a wizard lady, there was no contest at all. The wizard in that game was so overpowered in comparison to the barbarian that I had no way to keep up. As the barbarian, even with tough armor, I had to take health potions like a frat kid downs keystone light. The wizard wench just ice sharted all over the place and the baddies fell like flies. It was hardly even that costly to mana. I tried to branch out my warrior class dude to have some magic but it really didn’t work out too well. It’s hard to spread out skills too broadly, the gameplay becomes incrementally harder and having a bunch of basic skills just doesn’t workout. This is true in any class-less character game; Titan Quest, also the whole Skyrim and Elder Scrolls ilk. The difference with Diablo III is that the class system is very rigid. If you’re a monk you can’t use weapons other than fist enhancers. You unlock enhancements and can use any of them, but just not all at once. The amount of customization seemed week for early characters, but who knows what higher level players would be able to pick.

So I started play as a wizard. I got tired of it really fast. Running away and shooting a beam just seemed downright cowardly, and the damage inflicted was hardly competitive with other classes. It might just be an early game mechanic. Higher level wizards probably rock, but so far the class was just cramping my style. I toyed with the witch doctor, and eventually did a play though with him; which wasn’t terrible, just still not my cup of tea. My girlfriend still dug playing the wizard woman, she even took the game away from me and played it through before I did. I should probably preface you guys, my girlfriend’s dad was a developer at Sierra for Hellfire and my girlfriend’s voice (at age 6) was added into the game as an Easter Egg quest. So she’s really into Diablo and that style of RPG; but as soon as the camera can rotate she gets lost and confused like most non-gamers. It’s simultaneously awesome and hilarious.

So I started a barbarian character, I was sick of this running around hocus pocus crap. I don’t know why the male barbarian looks like he’s a 300 year old silverback gorilla, but its awesome in a Kung-Fu hair type of way. Anyway, the barbarian moves are awesome; it actually incentavizes taking on as many opponents at once as possible. Rather than having mana or endurance, the barbarian has a bezerker level. It naturally is empty, but as soon as you start hitting opponents it goes up. Then you spend the energy on special moves (such as a huge hammer blow that stuns opponents.) Combining the stun move with the weapon swing that takes down multiple opponents makes for some really aggressive gameplay. And I like that, I played rugby. I don’t want to run around waiting for my mana to build back; I want to launch head first into battle shouting expletives and getting a kill streak. I didn’t play the monk, but he has a similar style. Yet, the barbarian will always be my first choice, raw power, steel and blood. You know the drill.

Plus, thanks to the whole Conan mythos, the Barbarian class will ALWAYS be the most awesome. I think we all know what’s best in life…

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Planetary Resources

Vintage illustration of mining an asteroid. Artist unknown

Ever since a mysterious press conference at the Seattle Museum of Flight was announced last week the web has been crawling with rumors of asteroid mining. Those rumors were confirmed today as the conference revealed the initial details of the project. It was announced that the company Planetary Resources is “starting the Silicon Valley of space up here in Seattle.” Considering that Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is already headquartered here, with Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, part of Google and an entire class of small tech companies, Seattle is the place to be. I certainly am happy to have grown up in such a prestigious city; but it just means that my unemployment prospects are augmented by the fact that I’m competing with PhD’s for entry level work.

Planetary Resources was founded by space entrepenuers Eric Anderson and Dr. Peter Diamandis. Advisors include director James Cameron and a host of highly qualified scientists, astronauts, and business leaders. Larry Page of Google is a lead investor as well. Diamandis knows all about building credibility for space venture, he started the X Prize foundation with the ambition of human space flight as a target. This of course lead to Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and the birth of Virgin Galactic. With such a star studded line up of individuals, the chances for the startup being successful can be treated much more optimistically.

The first segment of the project will be a fleet of small space telescopes to prospect for such asteroids. This is exciting because it means there will be an industrial push to create a large set of science grade instruments in low earth orbit. I am curious as to what type of configuration such a telescope would have. I am assuming that a fair number of these will have a spectroscopic component so that element abundances can be determined. Radio dishes can be used to map asteroid shapes using sophisticated radar techniques. I am curious to know what spectral components will be studied, obviously hydrogen is going to be of critical importance.

Friends of mine in school had a project to hunt for asteroids using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) which is a multi-university owned observation project. The SDSS is outdated however, but the successor project, the Large Synoptic Space Telescope (LSST) is going to really put all other surveys to shame. It is going to use an 8.4 m mirror and a three-billion pixel camera to photograph the entire night sky on a weekly basis. With such a high aperture, taking images so regularly, the LSST will find TONS of Near Earth Asteroids. The expected completion date of the LSST project is approximately four years from now.

Sunset over SDSS in 2008

Ultimately, the LSST would outperform a fleet of small commercial space telescopes in terms of asteroid discovery. but this leads to a small problem. The LSST is partially funded by the US government and by investments from Bill Gates. The Planetary Resources is funded by an entirely different set of spenders, namely Sergei Brin of Google. Whether a commercial space program should be able to exploit data from a public science forum becomes a circumstance of legality and corporate politics. With the SDSS, data remained private for a year but public thereafter. But in the case of NEO’s, time is a very sensitive matter. To rendevous with an asteroid would mean catching it when its orbit brings it near Earth, the launch window would be small. P.R. would need access to the LSST data as it came in. I doubt that this arrangement is slated to happen anytime soon, which might be why they intend to build the fleet of space telescopes. Plus, the key advantage of having your own telescope means not having to fight over usage time. So even if survey projects like the LSST share data with a commercial enterprise (maybe in exchange for payment), P.R. would still need dedicated telescopes to perform follow up observations to acquire spectral information and precise orbital parameters.

I am excited to see what events unfold with Planetary Resources, their industrial scale space telescope project is exciting enough. I just love Peter Diamandis’s outlook, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.”

I can’t find any footage from the conference today, so for now just watch the youtube video release they’ve provided.

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Simulating the Entire Universe

Image modified from http://www.deus-consortium.org

 

An international consortium of Universities is working together to build an n-body simulation to model the entire visible cosmos. The project is current being run on a French supercomputer with 11,520 cores, 1440 of which are eight core Nehalem. If run on a single processor the task would require 30 million hours (about 3500 years). Fortunately, it won’t take quite that long for their computations to run. This is the first time the entire universe has been run at once. The Millennium simulation modeled a volumetric region but not all of space. Cosmologists are using computational models to determine how the stuff we can’t see (dark matter & dark energy) shaped the stuff that we can see.

The group has made substantial progress towards defining how galactic dark matter haloes work. Basically, our galaxy (and others) don’t rotate as you would expect them to. There’s essentially only two ways this could happen. One, gravity acts differently than we currently understand it. Or two, our galaxy rotates within a cloud of weakly interacting massive particles. So invisible stuff with gravity. Physics doesn’t have a solid answer for what dark matter is; but observationally, gravitational lensing does support dark matter over modified gravity. Here is a good Michio Kaku video if you want to learn more.

 

So in building a model universe, where does one start? Reconstructing the entire universe from observation would seem easy enough. You step out into your backyard, look up into the sky and try to copy what you observe into a list of coordinates. Okay, now try to find the distance to each of those objects. Parallax works in the beginning, for stars in our galaxy, but using parallax to determine distances to other galaxies would be like trying to determine how far away a mountain is by looking at it from your neighbor’s yard and comparing it against the view from yours. Luckily astronomers have something called standard candles which are a set of empirical rules that stack up to allow ballpark determination of distances.

But don’t worry, it gets tougher. Even though astronomers have an a tape measure for the cosmos, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Since space itself is expanding, that means that the astronomers’ ruler also needs to “stretch.” There’s something called the comoving distance. This essentially means that the distance between tickmarks on the ruler will be different depending on how far away something is. Let me blow your mind a little bit. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Since light only travels at a finite speed, and the expansion of space has accelerated; the observable universe becomes closer to 45 billion years wide. Another trippy but important feature is that as space expands, the light wave traveling through space dilates. Since longer wavelengths are red, this means stuff that is further away becomes more red. This is called cosmological redshift. This is what originally allowed Hubble to guess the age of the universe.

But back to the story at hand, the DEUS consortium is one of the largest computational experiments in the world; it will have a huge impact in cosmology. The code is even publicly available, and so is the data. So keep an eye on this project, the result will be nothing short of incredible. I’m anxious to see the types of visualizations that can be done with the output data. And even though this project aims to cover the entire universe, there will always be room to improve on the resolution of that simulation. Who knows what level of simulations will exist 20 years from now if exponential growth in computing performance persists. It’s cool to think people can reorganize sand into silicone and use it to remake a reflection of the entire cosmos. It appropriately addresses that saying “a universe in a grain of sand.”

Here’s video from the group’s website discussing specs and outcome.

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“Demandufacture” and Green Transportation

The Impact on the Globalization & the Environment

I am coining the term “demandufacture” here as a term to mean on-demand manufacture. Put simply, it means creating products or facilities as needed; preferably from long lasting but easily recyclable materials. The implications for technology like this could disrupt global economic inequality as well as our bulky, wasteful international supply chain. Now imagine clean energy transportation as part of the global logistics network. Petroleum could be used mostly in petroleum products rather than as fuel, cheaper more abundant plastics mean easier on-site manufacturing. It’s a beneficial cycle.

Why should trucks, trains, air or ocean freighters haul around huge heavy containers full of light weight commodities? Airlines generally charge by volume. Why should a 975000 pounds (442253 kg) Boeing-747 spend tens of thousands of gallons of fuel to move 5,000 pounds of pillows and iPads from East Asian manufacture centers to Western countries? This wasteful practice exists of course because the cost of manufacture in the second and third world is much cheaper than in the first. If fuel costs were ever to become so high as to offset this labor cost inequality, manufacture would return. That’s a no-brainer.

But why spend all that money hauling around low density merchandise? Even with sophisticated consolidation techniques, commodity density can’t match that of raw materials. With demandufacturing, the global logistics network could be dramatically optimized and made sustainable. Transported on solar+wind powered ships; the global environmental impact could be dramatically reduced. As the output performance of solar increases steadily; who wouldn’t want to switch?

Let me note, even if you DON’T believe in global warming; oil is a finite resource and should be rationed appropriately regardless of circumstances. Personally I think Apollo era pilot telling NASA to censor their climate results is like telling the NSF they need to stop funding any biology projects because evolution isn’t proven. In any case, even if you’re most “Conservative” climate-denier in the world; there’s a few things you’d have to agree on.

• After start up costs, solar and wind are essentially free
• Consumable, non-renewable fuels cost trillions to extract.
• Fossil fuels exist in a limited quantity, it will get more expensive and then disappear altogether
• Not paying fuel costs on an ocean vessel would result in huge competitive advantage.
• Having objects manufactured instantly from a vast network of enhanced “printers” would cut down the logistics costs of certain commodities.
• Managing a database of designs and DRM would cost much less in labor than several warehouses of surplus unused items in storage.

The bottom line, alternative energy in transportation and use of “demandufacturing” could cut costs tremendously and protect the economy from its dependence on oil scarcity. Also, Even if you don’t believe in climate change; why not switch to alternative energy in the event that you are wrong. Overall I think times are changing, but there are still certain actors causing damage. Oil companies still get 12x the subsidies of other energy sectors, but hopefully change is in the air.

*Note: I pulled some stats to compare transportation ratio, Dollar/Kilogram moved, and will be experimenting with the page to get the javascript graphs up and showing.

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