Missing Shades of Grue

Forbes announced its picks for the top five nanotechnology breakthroughs in 2006.

1. DNA origami, at Caltech
2. Nanomagnets to clean up drinking water, at Rice
3. Arrays connect nanowire transistors with neurons, at Harvard
4. Single nanotube electrical circuits, at IBM Watson, U. Florida, and Columbia
5. Nanoparticles destroy prostate cancer, at MIT, BWH, Harvard, U. Illinois, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (S. Korea), and Dana Farber Cancer Institute

As they point out in the article, the intersection of biology and computing was an important theme in 2006. But still no gray goo. Maybe next year.

Nanodot: Nanotechnology News and Discussion | Forbes: 2006 Top 5 nanotechnology breakthroughs

I found a link to Dennett's review ("The Evolution of 'Why'?") of Robert Brandom's book Making It Explicit over at Brain Hammer. I haven't read the Brandom book, but Dennett's overview is a nice read. Their views on naturalizing norms are very similar (as Dennett readily admits), though Dennett faults Brandom for leaving out an explicitly evolutionary account of normativity, while he admits that he (Dennett) has given too little regard for the role of the linguistic community.

Bill Gates is excited. The robot$ are coming.

And as I look at the trends that are now starting to converge, I can envision a future in which robotic devices will become a nearly ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives. I believe that technologies such as distributed computing, voice and visual recognition, and wireless broadband connectivity will open the door to a new generation of autonomous devices that enable computers to perform tasks in the physical world on our behalf. We may be on the verge of a new era, when the PC will get up off the desktop and allow us to see, hear, touch and manipulate objects in places where we are not physically present.

That all sounds pretty nice. But many of my students (and others) worry about a future race of autonomous self-replicating robots who want to take over the world. That's not going to happen. A more realistic scenario has Bill Gates and Microsoft taking over the world, which should worry us all. Let's hope the autonomous self-replicating Apple robots can kick some butt.

WVXU aired the Focus on Technology interview with my students on their podcasting experiences in the class. Ann Thompson, who did a wonderful job, talked with students in my Nanotechnology and Society class. I thought the interview turned out well.

If the sun were scaled down to the size of dime in Cincinnati, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be 210 miles away, roughly in Cleveland. In reality Proxima Centauri is 4.2 lightyears away, or roughly 25 trillion miles. Scientists have recently been looking at stars 13 billion lightyears away, which they think might be the universe's oldest objects.

Astronomers might have seen the very first stars in the universe. If so, these are incredible stars, some 1,000 times as massive as the Sun.

The alternative is just as interesting: The objects might be early black holes consuming gas voraciously and spitting out radiation like crazy as nascent galaxies form.

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, so these are very early objects.

SPACE.com -- Universe's First Objects Possibly Seen

I've been thinking a lot about Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange recently. First, there was the interesting post on Pandagon about Pastor Ted and his Clockwork Orange restoration.

Ted Haggard is about to start his formal three-to-five year "spiritual journey" of restoration, though from the description in the LA Times, it sounds like the man's about to be put through a horrible emotional, perhaps even physical, wringer by these fundies who consider themselves peers and friends of the fallen pastor.

Scary sh*t, as Pam Saulding points out. Then in the Times this morning there is an article on how evangelicals are using taxpayer money to brainwash individuals in the nation's prison system.

The program ? which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time ? says on its Web site that it seeks ?to ?cure? prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems? and showing inmates ?how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.?

As I recall in the movie, the prison Chaplain was the one person to stand up to the Skinnarian politicians, arguing that their brainwashing took away the individual's free will.

Prison Chaplain: Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.

Minister: Padre, there are subtleties! We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the heart at the thought of killing a fly. Reclamation! Joy before the angels of God! The point is that it works.

With all that is wrong in the Minister's project, I thought there was irony in the Chaplain's position then, and I think there is irony in the stories currently in the news. And the truly scary part is that today in the US the Chaplain and the Minister are working together. Scary ironic sh*t.