Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

Using the Right Bait to Catch a Comet describes Aerogel—super light weight, least dense material, hard to see straight, yet a great insulator and hard to crush. It sounds cool. I want some.

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Lie detector specs soon available to all points to the more serious if nevertheless slightly vaporwarious Lie-detector glasses offer peek at future of security.

A U.S. company using technology developed in Israel is pitching a lie detector small enough to fit in the eyeglasses of law enforcement officers, and its inventors say it can tell whether a passenger is a terrorist by analyzing his answer to that simple question in real-time.

The technology, developed by mathematician Amir Lieberman at Nemesysco in Zuran, Israel, for military, insurance claim and law enforcement use, is being repackaged and retargeted for personal and corporate applications by V Entertainment (New York).

“Our products were originally for law enforcement use — we get all our technology from Nemesys-co — but we need more development time [for that application],” said Dave Watson, chief operating officer of parent V LLC. “So we decided to come out sooner with consumer versions at CES.”

The company showed plain sunglasses outfitted with the technology at the 2004 International CES in Las Vegas earlier this month. The system used green, yellow and red color codes to indicate a “true,” “maybe” or “false” response. At its CES booth, V Entertainment analyzed the voices of celebrities like Michael Jackson to determine whether they were lying.

Besides lie detection, Watson said, the technology “can also measure for other emotions like anxiety, fear or even love.”

I won’t actually believe in such a device until it is tangible and subject to serious double-blind testing. But it is delicious to imagine how useful a pair of lie-detector specs would be for, say, watching the State of the Union. Or candidate debates. (Imagine a meter running in a box under the speaker on TV…). Or diplomacy.

Of course, I’m prepared to believe that, to the (greater or lesser) extent he thought about it, Ronald Reagan believed everything he said. And I suspect Jimmy Carter tried hard to tell the truth. But they were unusual.

The Inquirer, a fairly reliable source, says that PCs to change radically in 2004. While USB, SATA drives, Ethernet and probably SCSI won't change, just about everything else you plug into a motherboard will, plus the motherboard itself and even the power supply. Oh yes, the case may need to change too.

Sure there are real technical reasons for all these changes, but is it just a coincidence that PC and component sales are flagging a bit as people find their old hardware is Good Enough? Plus, that all of the old (i.e. current) kit — except those USB devices — will be completely incompatible with the new standards, new pin configurations, and new slots?

Worse, I was sorta thinking that it would be time to replace the 400Mhz win98se desktop machine I do most of my work on some time this year. But I'm getting a little tired of the bleeding edge on hardware, and I'm not that likely to want to get version 1.0 of a new motherboard configuration. But buy the last of the old, and it's stable, but also orphaned before its time…

Driven by huge losses, Lego is going back to the basic product (spotted at Slashdot). The market gets a lot of criticism, but in this parent's view anyway on this one the market has spoken and it's right.

Lego toys that are designed to let you make a particular structure, like say a Star Wars craft, are basically horrible. They sound like a great idea, and the kids clamor for them, but they are expensive and have limited play value. First, although there's a great dog-on-its-hind-legs quality about the finished product, the assembly is usually too complicated for younger kids. Second, the result is fragile and anyone who tries to play with it finds it falls apart in their hand. Third, you can't take it apart and mix it with anything — you'll never be able to put it back together again without that one critical weird piece you can no longer find. Fourth, there aren't as many other things you can make with the set as you'd expect given the high (licence-fee-driven?) price.

Despite all this, at least in our area it's been remarkably difficult over the last six years to find large collections of just generic lego to make, say houses and garages even though there's much much more play in those. It would be really nice if that changes… Although there will still be stiff competiton in our household from the number one toy: Playmobil. (Well, number one non-electronic toy anyway.)

Peter Deutsch's classic is reprinted by the always entertaining Risks Digest

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

1. The network is reliable
2. Latency is zero
3. Bandwidth is infinite
4. The network is secure
5. Topology doesn't change
6. There is one administrator
7. Transport cost is zero
8. The network is homogeneous

Truth hurts. And having unplugged at home from the direct ethernet connection and returned to relying on wireless…from a new desk position that is just at the edge of its range for decent signal strength…let me tell you that latency can get much bigger than zero.