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cool and crap awards
Cool and Crap Awards of the Week
At least two things happened in the world of science fiction and science in the past week. One of them was cool, and the other was crap.Coolest way to get funding for time travel that takes you beyond the singularity: Paul Saffo, a renowned culture forecaster among technobiz types, has left his job at the Institute for the Future after twenty years because it wasn't futuristic enough. He told the San Jose Mercury News that the trouble with the IFTF was that he could only get funding for predictions about the next decade, whereas he's more interested in the next half-century. So he's setting up shop in Stanford University's engineering department, where (implicitly) there is funding for ideas about what might happen in 2050. So what are the issues that IFTF won't fund futurists to think about, but Stanford will? Number one is apparently that global warming isn't a good thing, and another is that sophisticated new prediction software might make "forecaster" a job that anyone could do. Click through to find out the crap on how your car is spying on you. More »
design
Blinky Light Combination Lock Keeps Aliens out of Your Quarters
When I see scifi flicks from the 1960s and 70s, I always love the blocky, blinky lights on all the computers. Though they were obviously considered "futuristic" at some point before we all started fetishizing miniaturization and gesture-based computers. But now the DiY geeks over at Hackaday have found a way to make those blinky blocks into something useful: a keypad combination lock. Instead of keying a number sequence into it, you can key a color sequence. It's a great home electronics project, and it makes your front door look like it should open with that Star Trek "fffwwp!" noise. More »
Did Somebody Hack Your Virtual Breasts?
I can't stop thinking about a story that broke earlier this week about a bug that reduced the breast sizes of tons of large-boobed avatars in the MMO "Age of Conan" (you can see before and after pictures here). No word on whether the boobs have been re-inflated, nor any real explanation of how it happened beyond some hand-waving about patches and "morph values" for body parts. My theory is that it was actually a gang of feminist modders who infected the MMO with properly-sized boobies. [Kotaku]
hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Now You Can Have the Real Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the most indispensible form of technology is the Hitchhiker's Guide itself, a pocket computer containing information (some of it wildly inaccurate) about every place in the galaxy. Now the good people at Instructables have a posted a cool project that lets you create your very own Guide — just get crappy old handheld PC, stick Linux on it, and fill it entirely with Wikipedia. Presto, your own somewhat-inaccurate computerized guide to everything in the galaxy. Don't forget your towel! [Instructables via Hackaday]
brains
First-Ever Example of a Computer Hack Attacking People's Brains
Neal Stephenson speculated about computer viruses that could crash human brains in his classic novel Snow Crash, but the technology to do something like that has always seemed (luckily) far in the future. Now, however, computer hackers have created a loophole that lets them do it today. Over a month ago, a group of anonymous people exploited a fairly well-known software vulnerability that allows them to flood web forums with a lot of posts. In this case, however, the posts were on an epilepsy site — and many contained images full of flashing icons explicitly designed to cause seizures. More »
hacking life
This Weekend, Start Building a New Life Form
In a few years, your weekend hacking project will involve bits of DNA and a PCR machine instead of a soldering iron or glue. With the help of the Open Wetware Project, and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts Wiki, you too can become an amateur synthetic biologist. But this isn't about evil mad scientist stuff. People using these new open-source biohacking tools are trying create helpful life forms, like insulin-producing bacteria or drought-tolerant crops. Here's a quick introduction to the biohacking tools everybody will be using tomorrow. More »
entropist
Top 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth
It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. If we can hack Wiis and iPods and old Segas, make garage door openers into mobile phones and cause elevators to run backwards — or turn upside-down, or do whatever it is that elevator hacks are supposed to do — then could we also hack the surface of the earth? Could we hack geology? Could we use plate tectonics to re-direct whole island chains, color rocks, print cities out of magma, and build mountains where mountains have no right to be? Here are the Entropist's top five ways to change the surface of the earth. More »
9:00 AM on Fri Feb 15 2008
By Geoff Manaugh
23,961 views,
18 comments
Latest by n/a: Oh sure, sounds great! Let's angrily poke Gaia with more sharp sticks, see what happens. We've never really screwed up the environment before, right? Who cares? There are plenty of other habitable planets nearby..........oh.............wait....... more »
science porn
A 3-D Look Inside A Virus
The latest electron microscopes can create three-dimensional images of the smallest structures, turning an agricultural pest into a work of art. This is the cowpea mosaic virus, scourge of legume farmers everywhere, vitrified and subjected to a single particle reconstruction procedure by FEI Corp. You can easily make out the blue outer protein shell and the yellow viral genomic material inside. Maybe soon we'll be able to hack viruses as easily as we can image them. Image by FEI Corp. [FEI]
hacking
Hackers Take Control of Your Electricity and Water
It's now possible for a kid with a laptop to take down the electrical grid, say CIA officials. On Friday, intelligence officials told a cybersecurity conference in New Orleans that evil hackers could cut cities (or even nations) off from water supplies and electricity. Apparently, this has already happened in one country that the CIA wouldn't name. Is this a real threat, or just the CIA's bid to get more government money to fight fictional cyberterrorists? The experts weigh in. More »
biology hacking
The Dos and Don'ts of Hacking Your DNA
Yes, there are biology hackers. They're scientists with wet labs who are reverse-engineering the genomes of fruit flies, mice, chimps, and (sometimes) humans. But pretty soon, the neighbor kid is going to be whipping up little half-human, half-possum creatures in her EZ Bake tissue engineering oven. That's why you need to watch MIT biology professor Drew Endy's lecture called "Programming DNA" from the recent Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. More »
microcosmos
X-Ray Hackers Show Tinest Crystalline Structure Ever Seen
What does this one-micron sized object look like to you? Despite what Freud would say, that boldly thrusting little guy is a microcrystal, once classified as a powder too tiny to be imaged using X-rays. But a bunch of European X-ray fiends have rigged up a special X-ray diffractor at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, and presto — what was once unseeable powder is now a crystal! This discovery means we can see crystals today that are 10 times smaller than ones we could see yesterday. More »
tron
Must See: Tron
Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Sherilyn Connelly.Title: Tron
Date: 1982
Vitals: A roguishly handsome computer genius (it's a fantasy, for sure), looking for evidence that his video game designs were kifed, gets zapped into a computer by an evil mainframe and has to play video games to survive. Irony! Programs physically resemble their programmers, and he shares a kiss with a program written by a woman he used to sleep with. Is that like kissing your ex-girlfriend's clone? Or daughter? Or... More »
pi
Must See: Pi
Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Sherilyn Connelly.Title: Pi
Date: 1998
Vitals: A mathematician is obsessed with finding a pattern of numbers which (according to his oft-restated assumptions) will unlock patterns in nature, the stock market, and other things which need numbers to unlock them. He also suffers from really gnarly headaches, which probably has as much to do with staring at the sun as a kid (hello!) as with the numbers in his brain. Through it all, he's being pursued by Kabbalists and Wall Street types, and is going batshit crazy in general More »
real genius
Must See: Real Genius
Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by James Rocchi.Title: Real Genius
Date: 1985
Vitals: Porky's goes dorky in this celebration of nerd culture, as a group of engineering students (including a young-and-goofy Val Kilmer) race to finish a high-power laser for their demanding Prof William Atherton ... without knowing he's going to sell it to the Pentagon as a remote assassination device. Mixing campus hi-jinks with high-tech, Real Genius has a dated — yet very real — charm. More »
wargames
Must See: WarGames
Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Jason Shankel.Title: WarGames
Date: 1983
Vitals: High school hacker's innocent attempt to steal intellectual property and get into Ally Sheedy's pants almost leads to World War III. More »
