underreportedblog

Invisibility Cloaks almost here

2008-08-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

No, seriously. By making new materials on the nanometer scale, it's possible to make light flow around an object, like a rock in a stream.

Check it out.

Terminator, I would never kick you.

2008-08-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

Robots rely on information technology, and as such they are developing on an exponential curve. It looks like we're almost at the elbow.

The U.S. military is investing heavily in automated forces. The Predator is already in use and will soon fly itself. We'll have "troops" in the air, on land and in the water 24/7. They never need to sleep and will never represent a pesky casualty. They'll be optimized for reconnaissance and death-dealing. I'm sure the Terminator model is coming at some point, but a walking gun will do fine until we (or they) decide they need to be as frightening as possible. Enter the 'BigDog.'

Yep, that's um...it, walking in the woods, carrying a nice heavy load for a soldier. To demonstrate how stable and reliable it is, you can watch a guy kicking it (hard) while it scrambles to keep standing, and they let it slip around on some ice. It looks cruel and strangely reminiscent of the backstory in the Animatrix. The pic links to a video.

We're out of the Uncanny Valley

2008-08-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

For those who aren't familiar, the Uncanny Valley (theorized in 1970 by Masahiro Mori) is why CGI faces have thus far looked worse than puppetry - and why dead people freak us out. Primitive simulations of the human face look pretty good to us while we're still allowed to use our imaginations to complete the picture, and the closer they get, the worse they seem - for a while - because we can detect so many missing nuances.

We have crossed it. While inevitable, this is scary news. The Blade Runner days when we can't tell robot from human are fast approaching. Click her picture for the creepy demonstration.

what you need to know about Earth #2

2007-05-05T22:50:00.000-07:00

It's the first rocky planet to be discovered in the habitable zone around a star. The first of many, to be sure, but it's a big milestone, and the star is pretty close (as far as stars go).

It orbits a red dwarf, which looms huge in the sky because it's 14 times closer to its star than we are. If you want to look toward it, the star is very close to the brightest star in Libra, highlighted above.
Its mean temperature is between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, so we think there's liquid water.
It makes a full orbit every 13 days, as opposed to our 365.
It has a radius only 1.5 times that of earth.
Models predict that it is either rocky or covered with oceans.
There are at least two other planets around the star.
It is 20.5 light years away. They don't know that Dukakis lost.
We'll need either near-light speed travel or wormholes to get there. Or teleportation.