GENOMICON

Fairly Amazing video courtesy of Shapeways and Shelley Noble, who is a star.

I experienced something of a watershed recently (wtf is a watershed?)…

… I grind my teeth. I grind my teeth a lot – it’s other people. It’s the way they dress, their taste in music etc… but anyway, although I don’t look that outwardly weird, my teeth are a fair bit shorter than they should be. See… here’s a picture of me, holding a baby, looking fat, mad, older than I thought I was and generally a bit rowdy and scruffy. I’m an uncle.

So they’re not that bad – the teeth I mean… not bad enough to file down to little pegs and put caps on them, but enough to annoy me.

So I’ve been waiting for technology to improve to the point where they can be “adjusted” without any intrusive operating… and apparently, that technology is now here. NZ dentists don’t “cap” teeth any more – they glue/paint enameled bits wherever the repairs need to happen. No drilling or hammering etc.

Took about 15 years – for me to wait etc. And so long as we don’t blow up the planet, poison, or just generally wank ourselves to death, I think we’re going to find ourselves in a phase of “waiting for technology to be invented” for health/life or death situations.

Was it Aubrey De Grey or someone going on about this on TED a while back? (goes off, looks)

Yes.

If Aubrey De Grey gets his way and lives to be a thousand years old, his beard will stretch from here to Swannage.

I don’t know about TED actually – it seems like people get up and say all sorts of inspiring things and they get standing ovations (and I hate standing ovations) and such, then they go away and fuck-all happens. I mean I know it’s only been a year since I started watching this stuff, but still. C’mon. Where’s the fucking future? Hmmm?

It’s like there’s this highly refined and ephemeral branch of science-fiction which is to do with near-now predictions… vapourware turned into a type of performance art. I can remember when comedy was the New Rock and Roll. Now it seems to be a utopian branch of liberal futurism.

Still, never mind. There will always be an England

Ok, I made that up. In actual fact you swallow it, and it swims around inside you, doing all sorts of medical robot stuff

How cool is that? It has tiny little propellers etc. Looks like it’s 3D printed as well.

There are a load of medical robots over at New Scientist, and they all look slightly scary if you ask me – though possibly less so than someone wearing a mask and wielding a scalpel.

That green one at the end was particularly scary. These people don’t really get androidal xenophobia. Making something look a bit human is worse than leaving it as a machine. If you want people to relate to it as though it’s a… “being” then give it eyes that blink, and follow things about, eg:

It’s really not that hard I don’t think… if you’re smart enough to make a robot to pick someone up – which of course I’m not, so what do I know etc.

Human powers of anthropomorphism are unstoppably powerful. As Bruce Stirling said about some laser-projected smart-seeming tadpole creatures… no one looked up. Even when it was pointed out that these things were being projected from the ceiling people went “oh yea”, then went back to looking at them as though they were real creatures.

And we like them. We just can’t deal with them looking like weird mask-wearing psycho-clowns.

A couple of fairly amazing things have turned up recently…

One is the tube-robots at the end of this:

Which look pretty scary, until you see the alternative. This is a fairly good example of Machine Generations – and the rapidity of this type of evolution.

Sometimes… there used to be this urban legend back in the 80s “drag coefficient syndrome” where every year the new cars had a slightly lower drag-coefficient. One year it would be .45, next year it would be .43… and the story was, that if they wanted, the car manufacturers could go straight to .02, but they were milking every generation for all it was worth. I’ve heard a similar thing about various other technologies. I’m not sure it it’s true – but the car market has seemed kindof stagnant to me for a long time.

I think maybe this is why the organisms in a competitive ecosystem need to be small, for the benefits of competition to be available to a higher level of organisation. I bet that if instead of having 3 big car manufacturers, the US had 3000 small ones, the levels of innovation would be a lot higher.

Still, whatever.

Here’s another thing that’s turned up recently… a robot that can automatically send a needle to a piece of shrapnel. What it does when it gets there I don’t know… but a fair number of blogs have talked about it, without a photo. Here’s the photo.

(from gizmag)

Which looks pretty scary as well if you ask me… medieval almost – but then again, the alternative?

I’ve got this theory that every stupid idea is a great idea waiting to happen – all it takes is a different perspective.

So it is with bristlebots - I’ve touched on this before with the thing where the bristlebot turned into a possible engine for a space elevator.

Well another one’s turned up. Making a tiny bristlebot to deliver drugs to tumours.

(from : via)

It’s about 1mm wide by 1cm long and is powered with an external vibrating magnetic field. Apparently there’s plans to mount a camera on it, which is something I went on about before, and everyone thought I was mad etc. Microbial Safari.

Of course this particular robot is a direct nick from nature – foxtails which (in NZ at least) are the bane of dog owner’s lives because they get stuck between their toes, and like these robots, can only go in one direction – deeper.

Nasty little shits they are. Quite intriguing to play with though – they’re actually covered in micro-barbs to accentuate the affect. Kindof like one-way velcro.

Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, has developed a prototype for a pill that can be programmed to navigate toward a specific trouble spot in the body and deposit its medicine there, radioing dispatches to the doctor as it travels.
from