Haven't blogged in a while, but this seemed important enough that I had to get it out.

I came across this page about 'Utility Fog' (In fact, I'd heard of the concept for the first time only a few days ago while reading 'Age of the Spiritual Machines' (that books itself is worth another entry)) In short a Utility Fog is this
- "Imagine a microscopic robot. It has a body about the size of a human cell and 12 arms sticking out in all directions. A bucketfull of such robots might form a 'robot crystal' by linking their arms up into a lattice structure. Now take a room, with people, furniture, and other objects in it -- it's still mostly empty air. Fill the air completely full of robots. The robots are called Foglets and the substance they form is Utility Fog, which may have many useful medical applications. And when a number of utility foglets hold hands with their neighbors, they form a reconfigurable array of 'smart matter.'" - J. Storrs Hall

Now I suppose other people have aired their objections to this before, but here are mine -

• If these particles are smaller than dust (Utility foglets are proposed to be ~100 microns, dust is anything below 500 microns), how do they overcome Brownian motion in air?
• If a room is filled with foglets waiting to be assembled, how do you avoid breathing them in and accumulating them in your lungs?
• What is the source of energy? (counterintuitively: random thermal energy)
• What is the mechanism of motion? (even more counterintuitively: Brownian motion, see below)
• Even if the foglets had energy and motion, how much time do you think would be required for fog-objects to transform? For anything other than superficial - presumably color and micro-texture - changes, it'll be rather slow.

update:Sam pointed me to the Brownian Ratchet/Brownian Motor concept, in which brownian motion (or even quantum fluctuations), is used to move particles in a directed way by applying some external force - which does not cause motion, but actually stops it. See this very interesting SciAm article for more information. This type of mechanism is used in many biological motions - ion pumps, the actin-myosin system etc. Of course, whether or not we can engineer a system that can do this over the large scale remins to be seen.

On a related note, here's a '95 Wired article Reality Check: The Future of Nanotechnology It's funny to read some of the predictions in there - According to a professor at UConn (at that time in Syracuse), we're supposed to have Molecular assemblers now. Even Smalley thinks we should have some kind of cell repair by 2010. I'll keep my doubts until I see 2010.

I suppose there are dreamers in every new field, but what is frightening is that these new dreamers are not sticking to writing Sci-Fi, but calling themselves scientists (AFAIK, Drexler, Hall are not Professors/Scientist in any institutes but those that they founded themselves (IMM, Foresight), Kurzweil is atleast a proven entrepreneur, and frighteningly, Merkel is a GaTech professor, and a director at Alcor!)

Now one may think that Heavier than Air flying machines and Land travel above 40mph were also ridiculed based on the understanding of science at those times, but
a) our understanding of science is much more empirical and rational,
b)the objections that I have are based on some very real scientific principles and most importantly,
c) these dreamers are not doing any science research, but only propounding dreams to an easily gullible general population

I suppose we'll see soon enough... Oh, also -

• Artificial Intelligence
• Space Travel, Planetary colonization
• Superconductivity
• Flying Cars!

;)

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Science~
Edited on: Saturday, April 30, 2005 12:18 PM
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I knew somebody had to have searched for Area 51 on Google maps, and there are quite a few! Here's the satellite image (pan around to see the runways and the buildings...) of the Groom Lake Facility. Interestingly, if you switch to the maps view, a big swath is blanked out

The more interesting thing was, however, looking at the site of the Nuclear Testing program which is close by (in the blanked out area on the map) Here's a wide area view and a close up shot with mountains, where it's more easily seen that the circles are craters and not mounds.

Without further ado, I give you Google Siteseeing! Enjoy!

Oh, and have you checked out the White House? (Notice that the tops of the buildings are blanked out in the photo too!)

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Fun~

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Took part in a MRI brain imaging study here at Vanderbilt.

Well... it's as we suspected....

X marks the spot	Notice the rich blood flow	That's a wierd shaped head*!

*The proprtion of my frontal lobe (higer cognitive functions!) to the parietal lobe (sensory perception, language, spacial visualization) to the occipital lobe (visual perception, shape recognition) seems to be off a bit. Of course, I am no brain scientist ;), and everything seems to be going well, so I'm not going to worry...

Here are[shockwave] a few pages about the [more shockwave] human brain . . .

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Fun~ ~Me~

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Check out BBC's feature/compendium called "Planet Under Pressure". Very interesting.

Related: I must have (or at least should have) posted this before - Science magazine had a very good series called State of the Planet in Dec 03. It's definitely worth a look see.

It's It's not a pretty picture...

Also see: 2015 Where Will We Be?

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Environment~

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