What I did today...

Today, I discovered an Essay contest on Dr. Steel's forum for Toy Soldiers, the members of his army of fun.

I didn't have much else to do, and the subject seemed fun, so I figured I'd throw my hat into the ring (Though the prize is an embroidered scarf... not much call for those in Texas). The topic for the essay was to put down at least 500 words about our personal view of what a Utopian Playland should look like.

For those that don't know, Dr. Steel is a mad scientist bent on ruling the world with his Army of Toy Soldiers, fighting against philosophies of hate and fear to build a new world where Fun is the top priority, a world he calls a Utopian Playland.

Anyways, here's my entry.

Utopian Playland Essay
By Toy Soldier Continuity Gradient (Aka, Craig Blaylock)

Dr. Steel's philosophy of a Utopian Playland starts and ends with fun.

Through the use of fun, we, the Toy Soldiers in his army, seek to change the world for the better; Culminating in the creation of the Utopian Playland of lore. The question, then, is what exactly a Utopian Playland looks like. Here is my vision.

From a distance, the daylight side of Earth looks much the same. The oceans perhaps a little bluer, the land a little greener, Antarctica and the Arctic Circle a little more pristine in their shimmering whiteness. Twelve timezones away, the face of earth is much different. The former sprinkling of stars across the human settlements on the face of the planet exploding in a carnival of lights that bathes the night sky in a blanket of twisting, swirling aurorae. The clean earth and iridescent night sky are only the first step, promoting happiness by alleviating the fear of environmental decay and the shadows of night. In the right light, you might be able to catch a glimpse of slender threads reaching out from the equator; a ring of orbital elevators giving Humanity room to grow beyond this singular orb in space.

Zooming in a little closer, we find that the bustling cities, packed highways and choked sea-lanes have vanished. Commerce and urban life have moved underground to free up the land. America, an example formerly scarred with a spider's web of interstates, is now a pristine parkland sprawling from sea to shining sea. Those that visit or live on the surface are nomadic, wandering wherever the whim takes them. Their needs fulfilled by compact fabricating machines that produce whatever they need with the materials at hand, then recycle them whenever it's time to go see the next natural wonder of the Earth.

A hundred feet beneath the surface of the planet and honeycombed throughout the crust, humanity lives and plays through billions of miles of tunnels and underground cities. The People of Earth gave over their paltry half-million square kilometers of surface area to populate the sixteen average kilometer depth beneath. Deep down near the mantle, giant fabbers siphon off geothermal energy and liquid rock to supply billions of people with whatever they need through a massive network of vacuum tubes from as wide as a bus to as small as a letter. People can travel through these as well in capsules with life-support, and can move at many times the speed of sound because of the lack of atmosphere in the tunnels. Specially designed fabbers devour rock to build tunnels, leaving behind structural supports and housing in their wake. With futuristic technologies in place, these tunnels and houses can be almost whatever the residents want them to be; sunny tree-lined streets for homes, toyshops, and theaters dug into the earth's crust.

With all their basic needs met and their material desires provided for, Humanity's greatest threat is now boredom. Fortunately, Mankind is a diverse lot and the production of amusement is now the world's largest industry. The population is much larger than the paltry six billion that were crammed together on the surface, and so there are enough people to fill every niche market for curious entertainment. One of the more popular fads is the manipulation of the human body, and a corps of dedicated scientists and engineers gladly donate their free time exploring the human genome and finding out how to tweak it in amusing ways. A stroll down a busy street in this underground metropolis would feel much like wandering through a contemporary convention of sideshow attractions, yet as friendly as a sci-fi convention of that same era as things such as racism and body-chauvanism dissapear when you can spend every other week as something new and different.

No more fear or hate. Nothing to do but explore and have fun. This, to me, is an ideal Utopian Playland.

Without apologizing for the delay...

More news important to your future.

KurzweilAI.net Is my sister publication in a way, though I didn't discover it untill after I began this blog. A post references a New Scientist article describing new miniscule sensors that change their shape to move in the harsh Martian environment. This seems a logical step towards the possibility of nanoscale exploration of the universe.

Engadget posts a video uploaded to youtube by IBM. Big Blue apparently has some interesting ideas for the future of computing. My guess is that it wouldn't take more than three years to see this stuff ubiquitous in the market if there was enough push for it. Voice recognition at this level is doable today and the wireless technologies for the purposes demonstrated are in production. The only thing in between is software and hardware development.

Physorg.com posts an article on the Gravity Probe-B experiment, giving a thorough explanation of how the new experiment works.

Another post describes the studies scientists have done to discover the genes associated with learning and memory. Not only have they identified the genes involved, they've also made this database availible and searchable, making use of this knowledge much more efficient.

Yet another describes the current state of plastic solar panel technology and how it will soon be cost-effective to deploy.

Two more articles were posted on KurzweilAI.net in rapid fire, researchers are hard at work enabling printers to make electronics and bones from scratch. Add these to the list including plastic, chocolate, cake icing, metal, ceramics, paper, and soon organs. This is personally one of my favorite disruptive technologies. Being able to make your own stuff is what seperates people from large corporations.


Breaking with my usual trend of just the news that matters in the long run, I'd like to put in a quick shot to Swaptree, described in this DownloadSquad post. It's a new web2.0 beta that works like Ebay, only you trade items rather than buy them. They finally approved my application and I made my first trade yesterday, my copy of "Rayman: Raving Rabbids" for Stephen Hawking's "Illustrated Theory of Everything". I'll let you know when it comes in.


That's it for the moment, but I've got some news to browse for the pest of the day and you may see another post by monday.

Space, politics, computers... all that sort of stuff.

Here we go, another post in not too many days. I'll use up to my backlogged news eventually.

The DailyTech blog reports that IBM has developed a new vertical stacking method for computer chips. Most modern integrated circuits are all sketched onto a single plane, but by expanding upwards, they allow much more processing power to be contained in less real estate. The downside being that there is less surface area to dissapate heat, requiring more complex cooling systems.

Physorg.com is running an article about the development of a new telescope. This telescope is similar to the very large array in Arizona, with the notable exception that it is an optical-, rather than a radio-telescope. This first generation tech will only have a few telescopes small working in concert, but they will have an effective aperture of dozens of meters. One can easily imagine blanketing the sky with a large array of these sometime in the future, making a telescope the size of a planet.

Also out in space, Wired reports on a Pentagon imagining of orbit-based solar farms beaming power down to the planet. Unfortunately, economics will most likely prevent it from occurring without a breakthrough in solar panel efficiency or great reduction in shipping costs to space. Fortunately, developments are working along both those lines, see the previous post or google for space elevators.

Slashdot reports that the NSA and the leaders of our executive branch are working on expanding the already broad power granted to them. Now, I'm totally not opposed to letting the president tap phones at will and do whatever he likes as long as we are granted the same power. If the NSA wants to listen in on me, let us listen in on them. It's a balance of power between the three branches of government (which is being demolished) and the state and people tha has maintained our nation for so long. Times change and the balance will shift but we have to push back so that no one leg of our five-legged table grows too long and flips us on our metaphorical backs.

An Iraqi veteran is one of 25 or so trying out a new prosthetic leg designed for above the knee amputees. The new limb acts more like a natural limb than those previous by sensing the environment and preforming the actions of calf muscles. It's being called the first bionic prosthetic for it's efficiency in acting like a regular limb, and personally, the guy looks awesome wearing it. Check out the pic through the link.

And our last article for the night, also from physorg.com, describes a new online census showing more female Americans are online than male. It's not stunning news, what with myspace, flickr, and other social and life-sharing sites popping up, it stands to reason that more persons less interested in viral video would come onboard. I guess the old meme about there being no girls on the interwebs has finally had it's coffin nailed shut.

The Weekends' News.

There’s a good deal of news today as I’ve gone the whole weekend without making an update.

Engadget reports a Computerworld article questioning the validity of banning RF devices on planes. The article reports that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to ban cell phones, Wi-Fi, and other wireless communication devices in flight than it is to independently test and certify every product. The author makes a very compelling argument: If wireless devices could take down a plane, what’s to stop terrorists from doing so? Then goes on to suggest that the lack of news reports implicating radio technology in plane crashes indicates that it is not too dangerous to ban their use completely. This is a fallacious assumption, as RF does interfere, but the possibility of the ban being intended as a crowd control measure certainly bears investigation.

Slashdot links an article in the UK Guardian describing a particularly troubling estimation of future trends made by their nation’s Ministry of Defence. Predictions include Marxism, famine, war, urbanization, climate change, and, in a slightly more hopeful note, direct mind-machine links through ‘brain chips’ by 2035. When ministry of defense of the English-speaking worlds’ oldest imperial nation makes a grim prediction, people better notice. You don’t get to be a 1040 year old nation by not changing with the times.

Disinformation links another article from the guardian describing the events of a small welsh village that’s leading the charge of sustainable habitation. Small towns like Lampeter are pioneering our energy-depleted futures. One can only hope that they’ll be able to iron out the kinks in time to start spreading their innovations to communities that use much more resources than the farming village of 4,000 residents does.

Another post on Engadget sends us to an article from ABC news. Citizens from a county in New Mexico have voted to accept an increase in sales tax to pay for the proposed spaceport. Critics of the bill think that the $198 million price tag should be left to the state, as Dona Ana county has its own problems to deal with. Supporters of the project are excited that the plan is finally moving forward, and hope the momentum of this election will sway nearby counties and the state to their side.

And for the last bit this evening, Techdirt reports that the judge in the Vonage vs Verizon patent has issued an injunction against Vonage to stop them from bringing in any new customers. This, according to the article, is the corporate equivalent of holding their head underwater. Without new customers to sustain the company, Vonage will eventually die. All this because Vonage’s VoIP system uses the technology from three of Verizon’s patents. These patents “cover technologies that deal with connection of VoIP calls to the regular phone network, some features for implementing call-waiting and voice mail services, and VoIP calls using Wi-Fi handsets.” So far, the company has been orderet to pay a $58 million fine, and post $66 million bond, the injunction would be the final nail in an airtight coffin around the already struggling company, but a recent update shows they’ve been granted a temporary stay pending appeal. These are monopoly tactics, similar to Microsoft in the past decades. Verizon is slowly eliminating Vonages’ competition using the broken patent system as a weapon of corporate destruction.