Tuesday, 13 February 2018
Friday, 3 November 2017
SciFi short story from Nick Wolven
'Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do?'
I really enjoyed this very cool FREE SciFi short story from Nick Wolven
"There are screams, and there are screams. This is the real deal. It’s a scream that ripples. It’s a scream that rings. It’s a scream like a mile-high waterfall of glass, like a drill bit in the heart, like a thousand breaking stars..."
Via Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/nick-wolven-short-story
Sunday, 22 October 2017
Medical Tissue Regeneration
A device which stimulates the body to grow new blood vessels or even organs. https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/mediaroom/pressreleaselisting/researchers-develop-regenerative-medicine-breakthrough
It is interesting that with approaches like this and CRISPR, we are not 'writing new low level biological code', rather we are 'calling high level functions' which already exist.
Friday, 13 October 2017
Is Physics Different Outside the Matrix...
My curiosity was piqued by the title of this article:
https://boingboing.net/2017/10/03/elon-is-wrong.html
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1701758
But why wouldn't physics be different outside the simulation?
I suppose one reason is that for a grandfather simulation—where the simulation's owners try to learn more about their pre-singularity dark ages by letting others (e.g. us) live through them—it would make sense for the rules inside and outside to be the same.
But generally a simulation must consume less resources than the universe it is running within, and corners must therefore be cut. A program running on a Minecraft Redstone Turing Machine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X21HQphy6I) will clearly have less resources available than assembler running on the bare metal of a processor. Even ignoring the appalling speed at which it will run, lookup tables and special instructions will make some calculations scale better than others in the simulation…
We already know that the 'substrate' our universe runs on, is wildly different from the 'classical world' we experience. Some physics like entanglement seems to require access to 'super user' functions which break our Universe's laws, e.g. instantaneous communication of state changes between entangled particles. Quantum computation is another example of magic, able to solve 'classically' impossible equations in the blink of an eye.
Even if our universe is not a synthetic simulation created for amusement or research, theories like the Holographic Universe suggest reality is far less prosaic than we imagined up until now.
Quantum Computation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgCuKTN8sX0
Holographic Universe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bwLtlA9eDM
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-reveals-substantial-evidence-holographic-universe.html
Friday, 22 September 2017
An external womb, will change the nature of human reproduction...
"Once parental roles are equal, there will be no excuse for male-dominated boardrooms or political parties, or much of the other blatant inequality we see today." -- I wonder if this will turn out to be true.
To paraphrase Douglass Adams: Man has always assumed he was better than woman because of high-powered careers; loyalty to sports teams; and the status tokens of cash, cloths and cars. Whereas Woman has always believed she is better than Man for precisely the same reasons…
Friday, 15 September 2017
DNA Malware compromising DNA sequencing machines
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/researchers-encode-malware-in-dna-compromise-dna-sequencing-software/
I actually have a short story in the works about this concept-
Malware encoded in the genome of a biological virus gets sequenced by a surgery's diagnosis machine. The malware hacks the diagnosis sequencer, installing a computer virus, which compromises all the DNA synthesis machines it can find on the network. These start printing and churning out copies of the virus, infecting more humans who seek medical help. The infection spreads through two vectors: person to person and digitally. Every infected patient, sequenced by a susceptible diagnosis machine, creates more compromised nodes in the growing botnet… the plague spreads, its dual-mode allowing it to jump all quarantine measures and airgaps thrown up to halt it… nasty.
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