The Canon

I wouldn't subscribe to it, but I do read some of their blogs, especially Bruce Sterling's. Mind you, the only magazine ever did buy regularly was New Scientist (until I was given an online subscription as a prezzie). I stopped buying other papers and magazines about 8 years ago.

Yo DG

Why DG ? Genetics is pretty far removed from Mechanical Engineering (Or is it). I am not presuming here to think the two in any way unworthy.

You clearly have a back ground in Chemistry/Molecular Chemistry.

What's your thing.

cheers

aka47

PS looking forward to your Ball Mill thoughts/designs.

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

nope, the name is because I am very unlikely to breed if my understanding of biology is correct (men sleeping with men not normally giving rise to many offspring), hence my genome is dead...

Also a wider comment on the idea that our evolution is becoming less dependent on heritable genetics and familial ties.

My specialism is in ubiquitous generics (yes, I did just make that up) though the first things I was really fascinated by when a kid were physics, aeronautics and surrealism, and then other boys when I started to hit puberty

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and now for a topic related comment... read 'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson, not directly related to repRaps as far as I know (though it might be, I'm only half way through and it wouldn't surprise me if they crawl out of the woodwork in a few chapters time) however it is shaping up to be one of my favourite books ever... also it is set in the present day, which is very unusual for Gibson.

I have read pretty much all of Gibson (his paperbacks that is) including pattern recognition. Started with Neuromancer and got into his writing from there.

The missus is a geneticist though. Hence the curiosity.

On survivability of the species etc. I have to agree the current trends in cosmetic medicine etc are going to have some interesting effects on the gene pool. Particularly if the suggestion that selection (arguably attractiveness) is based on a bunch of things that are primary survival characteristics. Selection on the basis of these which are then masked by cosmetic medicine must have some effect down stream.

I am not going to argue against folk having the right to self modification though, I do feel that medicine per se needs to move forward from the skin deep model of modification to one that is DNA deep. (Not eugenics or designer kids, just self modification).

Overall though the probabilistic but random selection for what genes carry forward to the next generation should be able to cope with this.

Chortle, on Men producing offspring, certain religious groups are dead certain this is going to happen, (The messiah will be born of man, literally) Science seems to be heading that way too.

Swerving the posting towards being on topic.

Glory Box, Portishead
My Lovers Box, Garbage
Bionic, Placebo
36 Degrees, Placebo
Little Wonder, David Bowie
Man who sold the world, David Bowie

And the last for this posting, is'nt realy in line with the rest but is too good not to mention.

Hallo Spaceboy, David Bowie.

cheers

aka47

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

The way I see it, it's already happened, medical modification impacting survivability, that is.

I wear glasses because I'm nearsighted. My mom wears glasses because she's VERY nearsighted.

I wear clothes because both of my parents are practically bald from the neck down, and this environment, not to mention the social vagaries that have arisen around them, are not conducive to nudity.

I don't see the real problem, though. Technology is as much a part of mans nature as any nest is that of a bird. One of the things I like about the reprap project is it promises to better distribute the means of production, allowing anyone to eventually make anything, in low quantities. No heavy reliance on the overall population, allowing a small group to operate independently without backsliding technologically. Something that is practically impossible now.


One thing to consider, though. As medical science improves, and with it, genetics, we may have, and take advantage of, the option to tailor our offspring to better suit the environment. At first, the eradication of congenital defects and hereditary concerns, (not entirely a good thing...some of those "defects" have hidden advantages, hence their still being around. I understand sickle cell anemia carriers are resistant to malaria, for instance.) Second, the eradication of "undesirable" traits, that aren't considered by any to be a handicap anywhere but the runway or casting couch, or possibly the boardroom, (even worse, as some of those "ugly" traits will actually be survival traits in certain circumstances, others might be the acceptable eccentricity associated with creative genius.) Third, we'll just decide that since the parents have made themselves look a certain way, the kids should too. Or even, the parents have modified themselves with cybernetic gills, but the kids are already tweaked to have natural gills.

Oh, and on that topic, and this one. Read John Ringo's "There Will Be Dragons". It's another post-scarcity society, right before a civil war wipes everyone back to the bronze age...with "magic". It's in Baen's free library, so you don't even have to pay anything. [www.webscription.net] One warning, though. It's the start of a sequel.

I wonder about Moore's Law vs Genetics. In theory, if computing power keeps increasing in the same way as it is currently (personally I think it might start doing some major jumps soon, rather than slow as some of the pessimists think - [www.dwavesys.com] - [en.wikipedia.org] ) then there might come a point at which the computational power of our artifice exceeds the computational power of biological viruses or bacteria, making our mastery of the biological world effectively total. Alternatively, it might just give an extra evolutionary pressure to the microbiological world, ensuring that we never outperform it for very long, like the example of MSRA etc, vs antibiotics.

And to drag things kicking and screaming back to the topic, read 'Gravity's Rainbow' by Thomas Pynchon for an array of useful technical wierdness sandwiched between an equally weird pandemonium of events that will leave you reeling and confused. As twisted as Willliam Burroughs, yet as technically informed as Neil Stephenson.

Having read Snow Crash...I generally don't consider Neil Stephenson to be "technically informed". The bandwidth of the operator determined the complexity of the avatar, not the bandwidth or processing power of the viewing machine. Also, I'm a bit skeptical about his concept of nanotech computers. His "Diamond Age" computers read as Babbage engines, complete with moving parts. Perhaps that is the future of computing, but I have my doubts.

But, hey. At least we know YT survives to be a schoolmarm.

"In theory, if computing power keeps increasing in the same way as it is currently (personally I think it might start doing some major jumps soon, rather than slow as some of the pessimists think - [www.dwavesys.com] - [en.wikipedia.org]"

From what I've seen, Moore's Law hit a wall about years ago. I bought my son a dual CPU Pentium IV back then. It was a hot little system. Two years ago I bought a dual cpu Xeon workstation. It is about twice as fast as his is. So far so good for Moore.

I've got a four cpu quad-core system on order now. Interestingly, one of those cores is only about 30% faster than one of my son's Pentium IV cpu's and a bit slower than my single core Xeon for most apps.

The problem is that most apps only sorta/kinda make use of multicore cpu's. I write such apps, but most of the software development people don't and the operating systems like Windows and Linux don't really use them all that efficiently.

We do have new cpu's that are coming out that offer much better cpu performance and, very importantly, energy efficiency like Tilera's. Unfortunately, they're getting sucked up by the people who make things like routers and the like and we're not likely to see PC's with them for maybe 5 years, is my guess.

I'm not trained in these sorts of things, but if I recall moore's law applies to available computing power rather than cpu speed per say, so multicore machines are fair continuations of the trend, as is the fact that tons of graphic computations that are now offloaded to graphics cards. As I understand it the reason CPU performance has stagnated on the desktop is because demand is saturated. There are just few things most people want to do that require much more computation than is currently available. Even the power users doing 3D and video editing can get most of it done at tolerable speeds on existing platforms, so the new ultra fast chips go to high end workstations and routers and so forth where the performance benefits outweigh the costs of the chips and their support systems (primarily cooling). The bottleneck on most users these days is network speed rather than anything in the box itself. (With ref to Snowcrash, Sean, I think you have it backwards, avatar complexity was determined by the amount of bandwidth you paid for, bandwidth being the scarce resource)

Also Sean, I will defend Stephenson's technical knowledge (as opposed to say Crichton's) in that he has a good grasp on the current directions and is willing to push consequences and integrate them into the story rather than just throw technical terms around as decor and/or macguffins. I have my doubts about the practicality of nano-babbage machines but I can see where the sort of computing we do microcontrolers might be handled that way. And we do ALOT with microcontrollers.

DG as for the idea that we might "outthink" viral DNA, you should remember that we would need to outhink ALL of them. That is, the viral genome is a distributed learning system, every individual virus has a statistical chance to enter the mutation lottery to see if it can do better than the others, who ever wins explodes- thus a vaccine designer in Brussels is competing with EVERY bird flu virus particle IN THE WORLD to figure out what next years bug will look like. Lucky for us most viruses are real stupid, but it only takes one genius to win.

Genetics is just one big search engine.

The rate of search is governed by reproductive lifespan of the organism that carries the genome.

The search is running at this notional speed full on 24 Hours a day.

And the search is for the ultimate answer to Life the universe and everything. (Unfortunately not forty something)

The question is quite simply how do I do a bit more of Life, given that all other organisms a re searching for the same answer at my expense.

Complexity of the organism is in reality irrelevant, where the complexity has no impact on the reproductive lifespan of the organism.

Ok if we accept this then we can look at why the human species is out competing the rest...

In a nut shell it is Lamarckian. (probably spelled wrongly)

Genetics works on the basis that the only information carried forward is that of the pattern that survived to the next round. (Gregor Mendell and his peas)

As we have developed the power to record knowledge and pass this forward the next generation inherits not only that which was necessary paterning wise to survive to the next round but also the accumulated store of knowledge to that point. (This knowledge can be good, bad, accurate, complete or just propaganda it is still a contribution that has an effect on the next generation)

This knowledge can be stored (Books, Computers, papers etc) or common knowledge ie we access it through communication with those generations still alive who are from before our time (So communicative abilities are rather key here)

So in essence we are currently as good as the answer gets on our mud ball and are arguably a quantum leap ahead of our nearest rival answers.

But I believe that is really all that the difference is. Technology et al are only really products of that difference and are as much an inevitability as each next step in evolution is.

The only real question then is how many of us (if any) will take the next inevitable steps of leaving this mud ball before the remainder drown in their own sh*t.

Or will our current attempt sputter out to be replaced by the next best answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything as it inevitably follows the route mandated by evolutionary pressures.

Will we, Won't We that should be our question.

aka47

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

Hmm. It's been awhile since I read Snow Crash, but I remember the, appropriately named, protagonist using his machine and thinking about how good it was. His ex-girlfriend, using a payphone was at an advantage. She could see every nuance of him, and he was stuck viewing a poor pixelated image of her.
Also, bandwidth goes both ways.
Oh, I enjoyed the books, I just got caught by the technical details.
Who knows...maybe the future computer will need all that processing power to super-compress something so even the weakest machine can decode it casually, while the weaker machines send low-rez "compressions" as that's all the processor time they have. A bit of a stretch, but I could see it happening.

As to Moore's Law. Moore, actually paraphrasing someone else, said we'd reach the practical density of the then current method of making IC's sometime in the 80's. We did. He also said we'd find other ways, but they'd be slower to develop, about double every two years. So we have.
Moore's law applies directly to chip density.

On viri. When viruses get too "smart", a whole community gets the disease and either dies or recovers before anyone can spread it beyond the originating community. Viri self-govern in that the ones that are too potent burn themselves out too soon.
There may in fact be some really nasty viruses out there that don't survive in a population well, and won't until we have the means of keeping them barely in check.

Quite frankly, that's another potential advantage of a RepRap. It'd localize resource usage, mitigating the need to travel for goods, or for goods to travel. Suddenly, you're printing off a Malaysian design for a new car part, and as a consequence the chain of biologicals transferring tangible Malaysian goods is broken. Fewer new invasive species that way, and a weakened spread of pathogens in general.

Someone has already mentioned Ray Kurzweil's books but I'll bring up now as the conversation is basically following his logic.

Moore's Law is technically speaking about the density of transistors on a chip but this has been abstracted to be applied to the power/speed/price of a computer.

Ray Kurzweil has a lot of graphs (and quite a bit of handwaving in some cases) but his basic idea is the price/performance of computers graphs.

Add that to his Law of Accelerating Returns - basically that the last generation allows the next generation to be designed and implemented even faster - and you have a hockey stick graph that is in fact a double-exponential (i.e. the doubling time is getting shorter over time - it used to be 2 years, then 18 months, then 1 year, and in some of his latest talks he's now saying 11 months).

And when you add in that this underpins any 'knowledge-based' enterprise (which now includes genetic research) and you get some quite amazing predications for the next 20-50 years. I'd suggest that the world of 50 years in the future will be so fundamentally different that it would be very hard to see much further than that from our point in time.

Some of his graphs include points on the graph where computing power for $1000 exceeds that of a mouse, a human, and the entire human race. Even if he's off by an order of magnitude you're only looking at him being off by half a dozen years if his basic premises are valid.

There are of course limits but the limits of the relevant fundamental physical laws don't crop up this century.

I would recommend 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' written around 1999 as a primer on his ideas and some of his predications.

For a general list of predications for the future from a lot of futurists have a look at
[www-static.cc.gatech.edu]

My gran and I have had similar conversations.

She is currently 96 and whilst sight and hearing are well on their way out the rest of her particularly cognition and recollection are still pretty much all there.

It is very interesting to talk to her and compare her recollections of yesteryear and yesteryears technology (which to her is 90 + years ago).

Things we don't really consider as "technology" any more due to their common presence and use are still to her nothing short of miraculous.

OK My kids take for granted technology which was new in my day whats different.

What is different is that the amount of technological change we have undergone has been more in the last 100 years than in the previous 1000 years and maybe more.

This real life observation ties in with your guys suppositions and graphing. I think though the phenomenon is much wider than gates/transistors on a chip.

I am more than willing though to go with the idea that Gate/Transistors on chip have an indirect but very large influence on this. They give us the ability to communicate and store ever larger quantities of knowledge to pass along to the next generation.

A bit like a knowledge based baton race, it has been there for some time in book form but only really became useful as more people could read and the price of book ownership decreased to the point where everyone could access them.

Libraries were of limited value as there main book stock was Romances and Westerns. Unless it was a private library (no good to the general populace) or a reference library (in the minority where libraries are concerned)

For me personally an integral part of the empowering more people to be able to take the means of production into their own hands is to give them not only canned examples of how to do, but also all the knowledge to understand, what has been done.

In this respect I think this project is producing benefits wider than its actual original objective.

My gran still has her 3 book shelf library of books that cost her an arm and a leg in her day. Even though she was a school teacher all her life and a book fan. They were picked carefully to get maximum use out of the expenditure.

Most of us today think nothing of the Kilo/Mega Volumes of reading matter on the internet (Even though in the work we are doing here we are contributing another couple of volumes at least) and even less so these days of book ownership.

How times have changed, how much longer of the current boom do you all think we have ??

aka47

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

Probably until we let someone else tell us what is acceptable for us to read again. Or worse, what is acceptable for us to write again.

Correctly speaking,

In the UK at present courtesy of extensions to Anti Terrorism Law, Wikipedia would have to be classed as terrorist literature and reading it makes you a terrorist.

As would any web site which had any instruction on it on how to make probably any form of Poison, Explosive or improvised weapon.

Much less any that expressed a political standpoint that vilified any section of society and advocated their enforced compliance.

Interesting that Smokers are generally not considered to be people who are protected by this legislation and are actively persecuted and hounded for their pastime.

aka47

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

we have many laws that state what we can read and write.... However relatively few people know what they all are and most of those that do ignore them.

Also, the more laws are added to this list the better in some respects. I was asking a mate of mine what the law was like in India. I was told "There are so many laws that as a result there are no laws".

On the subject of smoking... even if they made it illegal, it would still be a non-issue, it would just create less government revenue. Besides keeping it out of workplaces is probably a good idea given how nasty a lot of non-smokers find it to be. And this is speaking from the perspective of currently holding a cigarette.

On the topic thingy, try 'Perdido Street Station' by China Mi

Yup read that one, and I think I also read one other by the same author, can't remember which one though.

On cigarettes I don't, but fail to see why folk who do, should be persecuted for their habit, particularly in a society which claims it is tolerant. I agree that passive smoking is unfair on the person it is inflicted upon but feel that improving this is achievable without the degree of social engineering and ostracism that is currently being dumped on all who smoke.

The suggestion that reduction in the number of smokers some how saves the government any money is laughable, you just shift the cost somewhere else. Less smoking equals less health costs directly attributable to smoking + increased pension costs + increased health costs due to supporting more folk for longer + increased geriatric care costs.

OK On topic again:-

Profesional Widow, Tori Amos (It's gotta be big)
The Logical Song, Scooter (or if your old Supertramp)
High Voltage, Linkin Park
One Last Run, Nickleback
Self Esteem, Offspring
Something to Believe In, Offspring
Frustration, Soft Cell
Tainted Love, Soft Cell
Chips on My Shoulder, Soft Cell
Secret Life, Soft Cell

Ummm Books

The Turing Option, Harry Harrison & Marvin Minsky
Fairyland, Paul J. McAuley

Oh and whilst it's not on topic but because someone mentioned him and I like the film and the book but for different reasons.

Naked Lunch, William Buroughs

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

Oh and I nearly forgot, but can't figure out how anyone missed these.

I can make you a man, The rocky Horror Show (in just seven days, apparently, must be a good fabbing machine)
Over at the Frankenstein place, The Rocky Horror Show

And so blindingly obvious

Bladerunner, The Film (originaly Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Phillip K Dick)

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Necessity hopefully becomes the absentee parent of successfully invented children.

Gentlemen - If you are looking for one of the first and specific versions of RepRap then you need to read "Venus Equilateral" by George O. Smith copyrighted in 1942. In the short story called "Special Delivery" he talks about the problem of replication using electronic beams to removing and replacing atoms on an atom by atom basis. The suggestion of using mechanical alignment was brought up and when asked about precision of a mechanical device the problem was that a mechanical device cannot reliably move 1 atoms width at a time. And so they had to use electronic beam control to do the job. As long as our tolerances are about .1 mm or so then the method that we are currently using will get by. But for more precise control what we have at this time is less than adequate.

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Bob Teeter
"What Box?"

Hi Bob,

actually we can move (relative) easily in the submicron-range with PZT-actuators.

I have some single-axis devices with a 'propagating-wave-movement', which costs between 60USD and 300Euros and are capable of single-steps in the range of 100 nanometers over a traveling range of 30 millimeters.

I normally combine three of them for an orthogonal 3-axis-nanorobot for my microassembly-systems.

As zhe steps aren't so exact with the 'wave-drives' (dependant of friction and load) you have to apply a measurement-unit per axis, what would rise the costs to som thousand Euros.

With special microscope-cameras, i developed for higher fields of view with resolution of some microns, i built manual micron-stages, where i control the movement with cursor-keys or a joystick controlled by a monitor with 3 splitter-views (mostly from above, from right and sometimes a coarse overview or a finer fiberscope-system).

With stepper-motors i'm in the range of 10 micron-per-step accuracy and with mcrosteping i can enhance the accuracy down to 1 micron.

So with a moderate cost-range (some thousand euros) i can act in the micron-range ...

For atomic precision i have to enhance the step-accuracy by 4 decades to sub-nanometer, what's possible with solid PZT-actuators, but would rise the price by more then 4 decades too (driving measurement, high stiffness-mechanics, vacuum) :-/

Actually you have a better chance to reach (bulk) atomic accuracies with bio-/genetic methods then over a mechanical approach - but the development in the next years/decades should close the gap between the nano- and the micro-/meso-/macro-fabbing, so you can decide which way is best (cheapest) for achieving your accuracies and volumes ...

Viktor

Where can you get these 60 dollar pzt actuators. Everything I have seen seems to always cost several hundred dollars.

Hi damonb,

some years ago i got some of this (should be 60USD per single motor): [www.edoceramic.com] and built a sort of a mobile, which glides with three motor-tips settled over the ground.

Then i tested with this type (should be at 30

Viktor - The only problem I see with all these items is even if you can get to the one nanometer resolution. You cannot make an item that is 12 inches cube or 300 mm cube with them. The story does relate that a slightly larger unit was created that was mounted on wheels that ran around the outside barrier of the town making additional houses each in about 10 seconds with complete interiors. So I guess I will have to wait a while until we get there.

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Bob Teeter
"What Box?"

Robert,

If you have that accuracy, and can keep it in an arm, then you could put that arm on a larger arm for course positioning. However, I suspect that if you're going to move single atoms around, and assuming the individual armature can move and place one carbon atom a second, you'd need about 6022 * 10^20 units ganged together to output 12 grams of carbon per second.

... right, simply stack a 3-axis-nano-positioner, capable of some nanometers accuracy in the fine-range and 20mm in the step-range as tool on your reprap-bot and with the right controller/measurementsystem you have nanometer accuracy over the complete working-area of the reprap ...

My goal aren't single atoms per second, but more the LOM-approach, where i put one after another thin sheets of material (maybe some microns or even thinner) on the top of my layered object and process some contour- and separating-lines (with a laser, micro-cutter or nano-mill) and achieve volumes of some cubicle centimeters with some microns accuracy.

Viktor