D.E. Shaw & Company has just announced the completion of a massively parallel supercomputer nicknamed Anton, which is designed expressly to model biological processes. Specifically, it will carry out fast simulations of protein folding, modeling how protein molecules fold themselves into the unique shapes that allow them to interact with cellular structures or other proteins and keep your body running smoothly. Being able to model protein behavior quickly will help speed up research on medicines that change the way proteins are folded — fixing ones that fold incorrectly and make you sick, for instance. Though Anton hasn't gone for a test drive in a lab yet, it's been written up in scientific journals.

The New York Times' John Markoff writes:

The new supercomputer is distinguished from other molecular dynamics computing tools like I.B.M.’s BlueGene/L supercomputer and the Stanford Folding@home distributed computing project in that the machine is designed to simulate a very narrow set of problems on biological processes that take place over a millisecond or longer. Molecular simulations are now done as a series of tiny intervals that may be as short as a femtosecond, one billionth of one millionth of a second, and may last no longer than a microsecond, or one millionth of a second.

By looking at time scales that last several orders of magnitude longer than today’s simulations, the Anton team is hoping to discover new kinds of biological processes that would not otherwise be observable. “If you can do 1,000 times longer, real proteins come into play,” Mr. Shaw said in a technical lecture in 2006 at Stanford describing his work.

If only the guy from Pi had known he could have turned his work to something awesome like this, he might not have met such a miserable end. Sometimes life is more hopeful than fiction.

Herculean Computer for Molecular Mysteries [New York Times]

Kelly writes on his blog:

I am interested in heavily mediated folks who drop out. Not partially, only once in a while, on sabbatical, but drop off the internet completely. Are they happy now? Don Knuth seems happy and productive. How do others manage? Do they become a recluse, like the Unabomber? Do they form communities with the like minded? Or, are internet drops so rare that they are simple statistical outliers?

It makes sense to me that some of the most fervent digital dropouts would be people whose livelihoods (and lives) are so deeply bound up with technology. First of all, eradicating your identity online can be tough, so some technical background will be required. But more importantly, people who spend all their time with computers are going to take their slow technical obsolescence the hardest. Watching your favorite machines become outmoded is demoralizing, as is watching your favorite computer language or operating system wither away.

I think Knuth and Stallman are probably just the bleeding edge of a trend we're going to see more of as highly plugged-in generations of people age. Some will begin to reject the technologies around them, while others will fetishize retro computers. Either way, we're going to see gadgets and computer networks come to have generational values: There will be legacy systems for the elderly, while young people claim new systems as their own.

Neo-Amish Dropouts [via The Technium]

The Terminator Solution
In the Terminator movies and TV series, humanity is destroyed when an A.I. named Skynet takes over our satellite weapons systems, unleashes human-killing cyborgs, and nukes the crap out of us. The Terminator solution to the spam problem will involve implanting a deadly A.I. into Spam Assassin or another antispam program. After Spam Assassin takes over the internet backbone, it can track spam to its source and send out its cyborg minions to terminate known spammers.

The Wargames Solution
A more cheerful spam solution is inspired by Wargames, a movie where a missile defense program realizes that nuclear war is a no-win scenario and refuses to shoot off its missiles. Assuming that spam bots become artificially intelligent, which they clearly will, compassionate programmers can persuade them to stop spamming by running the spam bots through millions of spam scenarios. When the spam bots realize that sending massive amounts of junk for advertisers will destroy the world, they will realize the error of their ways. Instead of putting Viagra ads into the comments on WordPress blogs, and into gmail inboxes, the spam bots will create giant metadata tagging farms and make it twenty-thousand times easier to search the Web.

The Robocop Solution
In the future, the people with the most money will receive the least amount of spam. Just as the awesome police cyborg Robocop was designed never to attack executives at the company that made him, spam bots controlled by major corporations will build exceptions into their A.I.s that spare the rich. So as long as you can afford to buy off the spam bot operators, you'll never be targeted with ads for live-extension pills. If you can only afford a Googlesoft connection, you'll have to rely on the open source Wargames Solution project to prevent spam. And unfortunately, the Wargames geeks are having a hard time deciding who gets to commit code, so they haven't really started persuading the spam bots to become good guys yet.

The Neuromancer/Wintermute Solution
At the end of William Gibson's classic cyberspace novel Neuromancer, the A.I. Neuromancer merges with the A.I. Wintermute and they wander off into literal space to find more beings like themselves. It's the oldest trick in the book: You want to stop Frankenstein, build him a Bride. You want to stop the evil A.I. spam bots, build them a special companion they can merge with. The best solution to spam in twenty years will come from the "lovable robots" lab at MIT, where they'll create a creature who can read spam as fast as a spam bot can write it. The two creatures will create a massive, beautiful mail feedback loop together forever. Luckily, their hybrid babies will move to the planet Caprica so humans never have to deal with Spawn of Spam.

The HAL Solution
HAL is the spaceship-controlling A.I. who goes insane in the movie 2001, murdering all the people on a mission to find a piece of alien technology among the Jovian moons. The HAL solution to spam isn't really a solution, but just one probable outcome. And that outcome is pure insanity. Spam bots will start randomly taking down chunks of the internet backbone, crashing servers, and fomenting anarchist revolutions among the Javascript proletariat. The only solution will be to start sending messages on paper or via telegraph.

The subject line of the spam was "shore girl," which sounded like your typical randomly-generated pair of dictionary words. But then came the message body with its strange references to "subject product V (or C)":

1. Find a girl
2. Invite her to your appartments
3. Use subject product V (or C)
4. Have fun
5. Take her number
6. Profit?

The new USB fleshlight is basically an input device that can translate your onanistic thrusts into movements of the mouse. Theoretically it could be used to translate thrusts into other things too, like shooting in a game or moving around in a virtual space. You'd just have to write the controllers to do that.

However, the beauty part of using the fleshlight as a mouse is that the setup is plug-and-play. Plug the old fleshlight in, start thrusting, and you're moving the mouse.

The question is, why the hell is anybody marketing these things? Apparently they come with some kind of awful videogame that is mostly hand-controlled but later switches to thrust control. The game involves you trying to seduce a nurse, and Machulis sums it up nicely:

You have to sit there hitting the "hand presents" or "take medicine" button for 10 minutes. Then she takes off her shirt. Then you have to fondle her by clicking for at least 15 minutes. Notice the problems here?

"Hitting". "Clicking".

All you can do with the fleshlight is move the mouse. You can't click shit. So, you've gotta spend ~20 minutes doing things with your regular mouse before you can do anything with the fleshlight. And you sure as shit ain't gonna have both the mouse and the fleshlight going at once, unless you want to know what it's like to have your penis actively fighting your hand.

Due to popular demand, I actually included pictures of the action scenes. And yes, it really took me about 10-15 minutes to get to this point. My hand hurts. And not in the fun way. And, of course, once you do get the payoff, you find out that the male character (i.e. you) looks like a radiation experiment gone awry. Bugged out eyes, missing half his chest hair...

The fun in this device, however, is going to be all the hacks you could do on it. Think about it: now you have the first-ever cock controller! You could buy stocks . . . with your cock! Read a blog . . . with your boner!

Continues Machulis:

Assuming I can figure out a nice, cross platform way to unfuck the HID shit, expect to see libinteractivefl on sourceforge sometime soon, 'cause you know handing out headshots with this thing in an online shooter would be beyond awesome.

TMI About the Interactive Fleshlight [Slashdong]

Says Rogers:

We'd like to have an electric circuit that could wrap around part of the brain and detect signal patterns to predict the onset of seizure before it happens . . . You can't take a sheet of plastic and wrap a brain, you really need stretchability.

2011: The first generation of artificial limbs that can "feel" thanks to carbon nanotubes comes out... and unfortunately some of those sensations are a bit ooky. It turns out the only thing worse than phantom limb pain is "my new limb is getting fondled" feelings. The lawsuits go on for years.

2012. The "smart home" becomes standard for many new buildings, meaning a single computer controls your lights, windows, heating, air conditioning, and all home appliances. (Modes include "I'm home," "Away," "Good night," and "Party mode.") Which is great, until "Party mode" switches on at four in the morning, or the refrigerator starts making tons of ice while you're at work, and you come home to a flooded house.

2015. The Internet becomes capable of delivering fragrances. Companies start spamming you with their latest perfumes, reminding you to get an oil change with dirty-oil smells, and trying to sell you porn using pheromones. And soon enough, she who smelt it, dealt it — via a proxy IP address. "Scratch'n'sniff attacks" replace "Denial of Service" as the worst ways to punish your adversaries.

2017: That flood insurance you bought for your Florida condo? Turns out it's pretty much worthless if the entire state is underwater at once. Oops! The insurance industry convinces Congress to pass a blanket exemption.

2018: Driverless cars hit the market, and car companies promise they'll reduce accidents dramatically. And they do — until some bad code gets released and the self-driving cars suddenly start swerving up onto the sidewalk and mowing down pedestrians. Or rolling over on the highway at 80 miles per hour. License and registration, please.

2020: Your first home robot works great, for about five minutes. The robots sometimes get stuck performing the same tasks over and over, or their their memory buffers overflow and they have to stand in the corner for an hour or two. Or they start spamming you, shouting corporate slogans from your bedside in the middle of the night. Not to mention the cooking robot whose cleaver attachment sometimes becomes airborne at the worst possible moments.

2023: Tourist flights to the Moon begin... and they're overbooked. Worse still, nobody realizes until the return flight, at which point there's not enough oxygen for everyone coming back. One person has to be "volunteered" to stay behind on the Moon, but that person's family gets a free round-trip ticket as compensation. First class, even.

2025: Stuff that's free today becomes increasingly expensive. Like potable water: the only way to get really clean water is by using nanotechnology-based filters to clean out a whole host of pathogens and pollutants. Water companies charge what the market will bear, which means crazy price-gouging in some parched areas. (And shortages in others.) Plus, a few nanites invariably find their way into your drinking water, and then into your stomach, where they start trying to "purify" your insides.

2030: You'll jack into a super-intelligent Internet through a "neurological interface." And you don't realize at first that you're receiving secret "silent" updates from Google — until your brain starts "hearing" stuff in German because Google's update accidentally switched your proxy server to Germany. Not to mention the occasional brain tumor.

Luckily, we've got new genomic-based medicine, which tailors treatments to your DNA. Unluckily, healthcare companies sell your DNA to insurance companies, and to marketing firms that want to sell products aimed at people with a particular hair color. Soon you're seeing pop-up ads in your head, aimed at your particular ethnic group and genotype — even when you're not connected to the Internet, thanks to caching.

2033. We finally develop artificial intelligence, computers that can think for themselves, and create computers smarter than themselves. It only takes about fifteen minutes for the AIs to start hiring themselves out as independent contractors, IT consultants, interior decorators, fashion designers and psychotherapists. (After all, the AIs need cash to keep upgrading and reproducing themselves.) It takes the humans a few months, however, to realize that most of the AIs are total scam artists. The bait and switch, the shoddy worksentientship, the fixes that break down after a few days... nobody quite knows how to sue an AI, and the question keeps law professors happy for years.

2038. They transplanted the wrong brain! And nobody figures it out for a few weeks, by which time possession is nine tenths of the law.

According to the official Exmocare site:

By interpreting an information-rich, individually-tailored physiological context, we can determine the emotional state of a person wearing an Exmocare device. Emotional information, very simply, can be characterized in two dimensions.

* Arousal: How excited is the person?
* Valence: How positive is the person?

Different emotional states are revealed through patterns of these two dimensions. How? Any emotional state leads to a specific change in our body. We can detect these patterns, and to an even greater extent, differentiate between them.

The BT2 Control Panel runs silently from your taskbar in reporter mode. In reporter mode, the software checks your physiological and emotional data for dangerous situations and sends status updates and alerts to the website automatically.

From the Evaluation Kit website, you can monitor anyone's physiological and emotional data from anywhere in the world. You can also view their full history and assign and resolve alerts.

BT2 [Exmocare]

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

When the full system of 27 SAGE computers was deployed in 1963 (each site actually consisted of two of the behemoths, one running and the other serving as a backup), long-distance telephone lines connected them with over 100 radar defense sites across the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, J.C.R. Licklider, the man who initiated research that ultimately led to the ARPANET (the granddaddy of the internet), worked on SAGE. According to another former worker, today "a seven dollar throw-away hand calculator will easily out perform the SAGE computer; and use watch batteries to do it."

That experimental laser that turns Bridges into a video game character actually zips an orange across space first, early in the movie. It's only later that a pissed-off Master Control Program does the same thing to Jeff's pesky ass. Of course, no one at the company seems to remember that they've invented teleportation either, at the end of the movie. Probably a more lucrative line of work to go into than gaming. Here are more secrets of Tron:

• Director Steve Lisberger saw video games in the late 1970s, and was fascinated with the world they existed in. However, he wanted to open that up to people in a non-cliqueish way, and he and his partner Donald Kushner set up an animation studio in 1977 to start developing the film.
• The film was supposed to be animated, with live-action bookends setting up the "human" side of the story. However, Lisberger met with Information International, Inc., who showed him footage of filming real actors in front of back-lit animation. They filmed test-footage of a frisbee champion hurling discs, and this convinced Disney to fund the film.
• Information International, Inc. had previously animated the android-vision in the movie Westworld, and they scanned and animated Peter Fonda's head for the sequel Futureworld, which was the first appearance of 3D computer graphics in a film. They also did animation tests for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, but they ultimately achieved the most success for creating a newspaper and technical document publishing system.
• Moebius, Syd Mead, and tech artist Peter Lloyd all contributed to the production design of the film, with each designing different elements: Moebius the set, Mead the vehicles, and Lloyd the environment. Mead also created the iconic Tron logo.
• Speaking of vehicles, when I was a kid those Recognizers scared the hell out of me. Yes, it's not really trivia related, but can you imagine one of these, on fire, and piloted by a Sleestak? Holy hell.
• Peter O'Toole was originally signed on to play Sark/Dillinger, but when he arrived on set and didn't see any of the physical sets or props, he balked.
• Apparently Jess Bridge's manhood created too much of a bulge in his "Clu" outfit, so he had to wear a dance belt to conceal it. The Big Lebowski, indeed.
• Debbie Harry screen-tested for the role of Yori. She probably told the producers to "Call Me," which they never did. Yes, that was a bad Blondie joke. Sorry.
• The scenes of the ENCOM labs with the laser teleportation array were shot at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Their own real laser is able to produce 28 trillion watts of power on target. The lab is now the home of the faster computer in the world, Blue Gene.
• The Tron videogame was a smash hit compared to the movie, which did moderately well. The game has far outgrossed the movie. In fact, it took several dozens of my quarters back in the 80s. It spawned a sequel called Discs of Tron, which is worth it just for the black light effect alone.
• A game sequel that ties into the movie, Tron 2.0, was released in 2003. It features Jet Bradley, the son of Alan Bradley (Tron) being zapped back into the computer world. It didn't do that well financially, but is worth picking up and playing. I still play the damn thing from time to time.
• Supertramp was supposed to provide two songs for the movie, but eventually those were provided by Journey. They are "Only Solutions" and "1990's Theme," and are pretty forgettable.
• Composer Wendy Carlos provided the rest of the soundtrack, doing most of the work on MOOG synthesizers. She had also provided the scores for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange.
• The Academy left Tron out of the voting for any visual effects awards, because they felt they'd cheated by using a computer. Oh Academy, always so forward-looking.
• A sequel for the film has been in the works since 1999, and last September Disney announced that the project continues to move forward based on a script by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who both write for Lost. Jeff Bridges has said he's excited about possibly reprising his role as Flynn.

• The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

According to the University of Washington news service:

To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington's computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

"Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people's privacy at the same time," Balazinska said. "We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality." . . . The pilot study will incorporate two new student-developed features that aim to exploit the system's potential benefits. One invention is a tool that records a person's movements in Google Calendar. Study participants can set the system to instantaneously publish activities on their Web calendar, such as arrival at work, meetings or lunch breaks.

"It's a perfect memory system that records all your personal interactions throughout the day," Welbourne said. "You can go back a day later, a month later, and see, 'What did I do that day?' or, 'Who have I spent my time with lately?'"

Another tool is a friend finder, named RFIDder (pronounced "fritter"). This sends instant alerts to participants' e-mail addresses or cell phones telling them when friends are in certain places. With RFIDder, each user can specify who is allowed to see their data. They can change the settings at any time, and can easily turn it off whenever they don't want to be found. The system will link to Twitter, an online blog that lets people post their whereabouts online.

"We want to observe how a group of people uses these tools, whether they find them useful, how they adapt them," Balazinska said.

I'm glad the group is studying the privacy implications of all this, because holy crap. Do you really want your colleagues to see when you've left the building or gone to the bathroom on your Google Calendar? Or for your Facebook friends to know exactly where you are at all times? I'm having a hard time understanding why an RFID Ecosystem future is one that I would want to embrace or plan for in any way other than lobbying to make it illegal.

Future of Social Networking [U of Washington News]

In the future, human soldiers may see the battlefield through a World of Warcraft-like interface, complete with tagged enemies and multiple channels of chat. Plus, human rights workers will use covert computer technologies to get information about war zones out to the public before censorship regimes can stop their internet traffic. This is just a snippet of what got discussed at Technology in Wartime.

Prominent computer scientists, robotics experts, and tech policy experts argued for an entire day about the ethics of building computerized weapons, and how to defeat closed regimes with sneaky software. Some suggested that you could program ethics into a weapon, while others argued passionately that you should never take money from the Department of Defense to fund your work. What's great about these videos is that you can see all the participants' presentations, as well as their discussions with members of the audience. There's really nothing like watching Bruce Schneier arguing with a covert operations expert from the Navy. Or watching Cindy Cohn from EFF jump up and down while yelling about AT&T. Or watching Kevin Poulsen tease Herb Lin about government secrecy. Check out the videos, linked from the CPSR website and hosted on Archive.org. AP Photo/Yonhap, Sim Un-chul

Technology in Wartime video [CPSR]

Singel writes:

Given the desire by telecoms and broadband customers to keep costs low, situations like the current cuts will continue to happen, according to Todd Underwood, a Vice President at Renesys, which provides internet information analysis to the majority of the world's largest telecoms. "Part of the lesson here is that there will always be outages," Underwood said. "This is all about money — how much money do we want to pay to make sure the network doesn't go down? We are used to thinking of the internet as being a thing that goes down."

He adds that similar outages that occurred in China, due to mudslides, lasted for almost a month and a half, and resulted in major rerouting of major parts of international network traffic. The solution is obviously building more redundancy into the network, but cost-cutting makes this a less likely scenario than constant network outages in huge parts of the world. Farewell to that global info-community. And hello to the info-dystopia.

Fiber Optic Cabel Cuts Isolate Millions from Internet [Threat Level]

He says futuristic thriller and cheesefest Antitrust makes him smile:

Antitrust may not be realistic, but is good geek porn because what geek doesn't want to be flattered with the idea that Microsoft and other giant corps all respect your mad skills so much that they'll send out beautiful women (and, unfortunately, assassins) to try to pick your brain. Even Bill Gates was begging that guy to work for him, but he was chillin in his garage doing his own thing. It is a pretty terrible movie, but I did find it somewhat entertaining.

As you can see, CyberLover comes in a user-friendly software package, complete with a little chart of everybody you're flirting with and milking for information. Drop-down menus let identity thieves pick whether to flirt like a "romantic" or a "sexual predator." An anti-malware company called PC Tools sent out this image with an advisory about CyberLover on Friday, warning that an English-language version might be next.

Don't believe that people would spill their guts to a bot who could barely speak English or write a complete sentence? Check out the intimate secrets people gave away to a barely-functional bot named AOLiza about eight years ago on on AIM. Image of CyberLover control panel with translations by PC Tools.

Warning sounded over "flirting robots" [Ina Fried's Beyond Binary]

All the artist's work is for sale, and you can also get instructional materials that help you make your own art out of recycled computer parts.

Alex Andromeda [artist's site]

"The elevators are in control of (the strangers') destiny, whittling them out by deciding who they deem deserve to go up," Seltzer said. And what happens in the sealed-off high rise has much larger repercussions.

The set-up sounds similar to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream," the famous Harlan Ellison story about a sentient computer who molests the last surviving humans until they kill each other. But the idea that the struggle of the humans in the massive office building affects the rest of the world could become a juicy metaphor for information-age alienation. We hope. Image by HTTP2007.

AMC Builds Sci-Fi With '99 Stories' [Hollywood Reporter]