GENOMICON

Like most kids in the 1970s, I spent pretty much the whole time looking for UFOs.

“Watch The Skys” they said. We did. Never saw one though. I now spend pretty much all my time looking for them on the internet, and still haven’t seen one. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I’m the zeitgeist me. Like a really complicated clock that doesn’t do anything except point out the bleedin obvious. Still. Something to do innit.

So appropos of that, here’s the flying disc that everyone’s going on about at the mo – even though the comments on youtube say it’s “old tech” – but I’ve never seen it before. I think it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, but then I think that about pretty much everything, at least once. It’s definately one of the coldest things I’ve seen in my life.

Description of how to make here. I quite like the idea of putting a lump of this stuff in a block of aerogel… with hydrogen pockets etc, to see if it can float on earth’s magnetic field currents. Probably not – but it’s a nice idea. Trying to recreate the drones that Iain Banks is always going on about. Even embedding magnets into walls would be ok. I just want one of those drone things. With knife-missiles.

Appropos of that… this is the closest thing I’ve seen to an aeronautical zorb yet.

Not the fastest milk-cart in the west, but it is its own airbag, which is very reassuring for the likes of me. I’d actually prefer to be inside it rather than hanging off the bottom etc… but you get the idea.

And not related to that at all, is (for the record) a thing that looks a bit like a UFO but which is actually made out of lego and which can do a rubiks cube in about 6 seconds.

There are now literally hundreds of these – but this one is interesting to me because it’s using a smartphone as a sensorpod. See… that’s what we need. A smartphone embedded in a block of aerogel, it’s weight offset by hydrogen pockets and with a lump of superconducting stuff using the ambient magnetic fields to cruise about the place. With AI (not Siri, proper AI) and knife-missiles.

Here’s a UFO video.

It’s been seen over 18 million times.

This is pretty cool

From DIY Drones, the founding dude of which is now one of the Ponoko Advisory board people?

Being the roll-only stabiliser version, the one below being two-axis

The previous post had a quadracopter balancing a tall pole with a ball on the end of it… while doing vaguely acrobatic stuff… I think it all turns on this – feedback-loops between servos (or whatever) and sensors. I really ought to start playing with this stuff myself, but I want to use one of these…

… just go straight to using a full-blown computer (with the brain the size of a planet) to do simple electronic tasks… because I’m too lasy to learn how to do things with arduinos and such. I’ve actually got one as well. I should stop pranneting about and give it another go I guess. I need to make myself a little project that is specifically to do with fitting a genetic algorithm between a sensor and an actuator. I know how to write them… just never really had a reason to. The only thing I can think of right now is helio-sensitive sensitive/tracking mirror matrix… which is a little more doable now that Ponoko does mirrored acrylic.

Ok – bit of a weird one today – a mishmashed collection of various tech bits that more or less revolve around a theme. It’s a concept-link-latte. I’m not sure what the theme is, but it’s something like

“What the fuck are we building here?” or
“How to make Skynet in 5 easy lessons”

1) Genetic Algorithms again.

Genetic algorithms are simple little programs that simulate evolution by (re)combining groups of actions, keeping the ones that works best, ditching the rest, then recombining again. They can arrive quite quickly at solutions to complex problems.

Here’s a fairly remarkable video where a simulation of a person teaches itself to walk

2) “Situational Awareness”

O how I love it when my hysterical bug-eyed predictions come true.

Some Australians have spent a mere million dollars and invented a thing which stitches together all of their CCTV camera feeds so you can walk around in them like doom. You could use augmented reality to turn the homeless people into Zombies so you don’t feel bad about killing them.

These are using existing CCTVs… but you could just as easily (in fact more easily) achieve the same thing using

3) Perch and Stare bots

So you just fly a bunch of these things into an area and position them such that you can create a 3D map of the place… with proper depth-perception (as is on Darpa’s shopping list) maybe.

I learned how to use these

last week – they’re little mesh-networking things… cheap as chips with a line-of-site range of about a mile… works through walls etc to a more limited extent. I saw one this morning that had a range of 40 miles… which is… miles!.

I’m not sure that these would have the bandwidth to transmit real-time video (my ones run at 38400 baud)… but you get the idea. It’s not entirely outside the bounds of possibility to drop a cluster bomb of CCTV cameras over an area and operate them from another country. They’re so cheap though that you and I could probably do it.

4) Automated Kill Zones

As being set up by the Israelis.

Accompanied of course by flying drones, and flotillas of euphemisms designed to obscure the fact that what’s actually happening here is that people’s Dads, Brothers, Sons, Daughters, Husbands, Wives, Mums… are being killed.

Still as long as they’re not controlled by n’ n’ n’ nineteen year olds, what could possibly go wrong?

Anyway… enough about that… back to the warm, touchy-feelyness of

5) a plane that looks like a dolphin

The cool thing about these, is that they’ve actually made them, and they actually go… quite well.

It’s electric – hydrogen fuel-cell powered. Lots of specs and whatnot on the site, though right now they’re just tinkering with the toy-sized version – the skin of which is made with a CNC milled mold… which is used to shape fibre-glass.

Something well within the abilities of 5th generation repraps in other words… something largely creatable from a direct digital->physical process in other words.

So maybe you wouldn’t have to drop a cluster-bomb filled with Perch-and-Stare drones, but a single reprap with a load of vitamin parts.

A way to go yet of course. I’m still of the opinion that humans are the ultimate vitamin part… and whatever emerges, it will be a human/machine symbiote, rather than a machine takeover.

I mean in a way we’ve already got this – except that the machine, isn’t a physical object… it’s a set of formulas, laws and conditions – it’s debt-based currency and corporatism, with it’s grotesque and alien offspring… “defence” industries, privatised prisons, privatised water/food/health systems, derivative colonialism etc etc.

We’ve actually already got the monster. Skynet is just something that will flex its muscles in the sunlight (one bright morning), several sheddings-of-skin into the future.