Other articles

1. MC Hawking!

   
   

   
   

   I love Noisebridge to pisces. For those of you who haven’t been there yet, Noisebridge is (one of) the Bay Area’s hackerspaces. And it’s one of two places in the world where I feel at home, the other being Mt. Hood National Forest.

   I attended, and briefly spoke at, Hackmeet 2011 this past weekend, and I was incredibly fortunate to meet about a dozen amazing new people. Two of whom, Jake and Lilia, have worked to create my new best friend, MC Hawking a.k.a NoiseBot.

   

   MC Hawking is a robot who lives on a wheelchair. He’s got text-to-speech, remote controls, a bow tie, a bold warning which reads

   WARNING: NOT THREE LAWS COMPLIANT

   and a missile launcher. Although he’s also got an X-Box Kinect, several sensors, and several cameras hooked up to him, he can’t yet seem to abstain from violently mowing down any objects or humans within his path.

   Jake did all the hardware, and Lilia has done most of the programming work so far.

   My goals are to write an intelligent routing agent for MC Hawking, so that any location can be defined as a goal, and an A* heuristic will automatically route the robot to the location, avoiding objects and humans in the way using the 3D-vision from the Kinect. I would also like to find a way to connect the DISCERN neural network I’ve been raising, Puppetmaster, to MC Hawking, which would give my little A.I. child a real robot body. So far, DISCERN would only work to think of neat things to say to people through MC Hawking’s text-to-speech, but it would be extra neat to find some way to teach Puppetmaster about the world so that it could autonomously decide where to go and what to do physically as well as intellectually.

   Here’s a video of me remote controlling MC Hawking through SSH:

   MC Hawking — Remote Control through SSH

   And here’s MC Hawking following me around as I videotape him, using facial recognition:

   MC Hawking — Following a human face

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2. Robots Windsurfing Asteroids

   
   

   

   China is like the punk house of the first world.

   Okay, China, your firewall is so draconian as to be absolutely silly¹, and it causes me extra work to send Tor bridge addresses to your citizens. And your hackers, the ones you scoop up by the dozen and put on government payrolls simply to cause havoc for hackers and activists in your own and other countries… yeah. That’s a little annoying. And your cute little botmaster who has been sending bad requests to my server for the past week or so: meh, whatevs.

   But I just found out, China, that y’all are planning to send a robot to an asteroid to deflect it from a collision course with Earth in 2036. And how are you going to do that? Oh, okay. The robot is going to windsurf the asteroid away from Earth.

   I’m willing to forgive the above transgressions, because you just earned +9000 punk points with that idea. You guys are not a country — you’re a giant punk house.

   ¹ The Great Firewall of Chinese uses a method very similar to this.

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3. Opera & Transhumanism II

   
   

   [][The NBIC Report] (click for full .pdf) was the published result of a U.S. government sponsored conference on converging technologies applicable to improving human performance: “The chief areas of application include: expanding human cognition and communication, improving human health and physical capabilities, enhancing group and societal outcomes, strengthening national security, and unifying science and education. Convergence will be based on the material unity of nature at the nanoscale, technology integration from the nanoscale, key transforming tools, the concept of reality as closely coupled hierarchical complex systems, and the goal to improve human performance.”

   It was released in 2002, so those of you who are up-to-date on current research should skip ahead to the more current research articles I will post below. Everybody else, I highly recommend at least flipping through the table of contents and reading the more interesting articles, such as “Spatial Cognition and Converging Technologies”, “Sociable Technologies: Enhancing Human Performance When the Computer is not a Tool but a Companion”, and “Brain-Machine Interfacing”. Other papers included in the NBIC Report are borderline frightening, for instance, “High Performance Warfighter”, “DARPA’s Programs in Enhancing Human Performance”, or “Socio-Tech…The Predictive Science of Societal Behavior” and its comments on government usage of using predictive sociological algorithms to stop “terrorism” before it occurs. Obviously, it is extremely important for us radically-minded anti-government individuals to be well versed in current technological research: these are the tools which will be used to subjugate us tomorrow. If we learn about them now, we may influence their usage and possibly even effectively use them for positive change.

   More information and current research articles after the jump!

   Now that you’re busy with that 482-page monster of a pdf, here’s some more recent research. I realize I might get in trouble for this, so I’m going to say in advance: “Oops, sorry, I didn’t realize these were copyrighted.” I have the privilege of research access to numerous academic journals, and, unfortunately for the publishers, I do not believe that only those with disposable finances should have access to knowledge and educational materials. So here you go, read up!

   Also, in keeping with the topic, I would highly recommend listening to opera while reading this stuff. Or Wagner. I’m kidding, I think.

   Bioinformatics(click for downloadable .pdfs)

   [(2010) Bioinformatic and experimental survey of 14-3-3-binding sites]

   (2010) Bioinformatic workflow system for large data sets

   [(2010) Functional Impact of Transposable Elements Using Bioinformatic Analysis]

   (2010) GMOD Drupal Bioinformatics Server

   Implants and Prosthetics (click for downloadable .pdfs)

   (2009) Feasibility Study of a Retinal Prosthesis

   Nanotechnology (click for downloadable .pdfs)

   (2010) MEMS, Sensors, and Nanotechnology

   (2010) Responsibility and Nanotechnology

   (2010) Nanotechnology in textiles

   (2010) Nanotechnology: Molecular robots on the move

   (2010) New Products: Focus on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

   (2010) Nanotechnology and its applications in surgery

   (2010) Nanotechnology Makes Strides in Quantum Dots, Medicine

   [(2010) Nanotechnology, Bionanotechnology and Microbial Cell Factories]

   [(2010) Research Advances: Nanotechnology Research Attacks Cancer, Offers Big Development in Light Harvesting, and Addresses the …

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