• Nanotech issue: Scientific American Sept. 2001
• New Book: Damien Broderick - The Spike
• Search Engines - Google and others
• Napster alternatives
• Hotlinks to hot topics
• eFeedback:
  • Future Factory - Man & dog story
  • Thoughts on technohumans
  • Kamen's iBOT

Scientific American - Nanotech issue

This is an excellent opportunity for you and I to catch up on this important new technology. This SciAm issue has 3 major articles (with a lot of sub-topics and sidebars) that present a complete view - for the layman, as well as for the technologist.

Scientific American: Nanotech special issue (Sept. 2001)

Nanotechnology - What is it? Will it meet its ambitious goals?

This SciAm issue features an excellent summary article by Eric Drexler - the Nanotech pioneer. He writes in simple, easy to understand language, predicting that that the tiniest robots will revolutionize manufacturing and transform society.

Eric Drexler's article

Drexler says he got his initial inspiration from a 1959 talk by Richard Feynman (Nobel prize - Physics 1965).

Text of Feynman's speech:There's plenty of room at the bottom

Biology outmatches futurists' fantasies for molecular robots

New book : 'The Spike'

Australian writer, Damien Broderick is a respected interpreter of science and technology with a gift for seeing the connections between different technologies and synthesizing diverse areas of knowledge. He writes with infectious enthusiasm, peeling back the layers of jargon which surround recent advances in nanotech, biotech, and all the other techs that are daring us to keep up.

This book will hook you!

Broderick's The Spike

Search engines

I have demonstrated my prowess many times to family and friends (even as a party-trick) with the challenge : Ask me anything, and I'll find it for you within 5 minutes! They ask for song lyrics, the name of a poem from just one line they remember, some obscure mathematical theorem, and other interesting, and sometimes odd, things (find me a picture of a 1956 Dodge Dart).

You know, most often I surprise them by coming back in less than the allocated 5 minutes, with the right answer. (In the case of the Dodge Dart, I found a 1958 model and quickly changed the caption to 1956 before I printed the page (wink ;) )

There seem to be many choices for doing a web-search - Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek - but some are only portals. Inability to find the right revenue-model has caused many to outsource their core search-engine technology and services.

Today, Google, AskJeeves and AltaVista are the only branded websites that still power their own searches. Google is the winner, with its quick response and focus on search, search and nothing but search (it is not a portal like Yahoo).

You can use Google through the JimPinto.com website - try it. Go to www.JimPinto.com and scroll to the bottom blue section. You'll see a space for entering your search words or phrase - with a choice of two buttons: Search locally (the JimPinto.com website) - or search the entire web.

Try it! Think of an item you may have read in eNews a few months ago - and you'll find it with a click. Or, enter a word, or phrase, or even your own name, and search the web. It's fast, and its fun!

Google has become a web favorite because it's simple and it works. But today, a new generation of search engines is emerging to challenge the dominance of Google. If you're interested, you might try some of them, to review their special features.

WiseNut

Teoma

Lasoo

Vivisimo

WIRED news item (Aug. 14, 2001): Searching for Google's Successor

Napster alternatives

"News Flash! The ability to transfer files is currently disabled. We're still fine tuning our noticed-works filters and hope to begin testing them again soon. Know that we are working as fast as we can to bring file sharing back. Thanks for your continued support."

Interestingly, though the file sharing is peer-to-peer (direct from one users computer to the other users computer) Napster is still a central "clearing house" - which has now been stopped. It will resume, but users will be charged a fee - it will cost you to connect to my computer through Napster, though I won't get a cent!

This brings up true peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing alternatives - users connecting to each other, without a central control scheme. When P2P is used, no one can shut things down simply because there is no central source to shut down.

Here are some current Napster alternatives:

The Gnutella network shares all file formats in a peer-to-peer, decentralized system. Currently, Gnutella sometimes takes several minutes to initialize, searches are slow and content can be difficult to find. Gnutella's significance comes from it being a truly decentralized file-sharing network. Limewire and BearShare are Gnutella network clients.

Limewire

Bearshare

KaZaA shares music, videos, programs and documents in a peer-to-peer, marginally centralized system (users with high-speed connections can opt to function as supernodes, sharing a large number of files on the network). Reports 7 million downloads to date.

KaZaA

Morpheus - owned by Musiccity, with technology from KaZaA.

Audiogalaxy shares music files in .mp3 format in a centralized system. Large selection, though some popular music is banned.

Audiogalaxy

Hot links to HOT topics

Well, mostly from the web (my 'robots' bring back the types of techhy tidbits I ask for). I follow up the daily and weekly flow of email news and browse the new issues of leading magazines like WIRED and MIT-TECH-REVIEW.

Try the new button on the JimPinto.com homepage: "Hot links to hot topics". There you'll find web links to some of our favorite sources - technology, markets, mergers, people, products - and even the poetry which we're passionate about.

You might like to spend a few minutes here - or a few hours or days. Come back now and then, to find good stuff - we update regularly.

Enjoy....

JimPinto.com Hotlinks

eFeedback

"Jim, you thoroughly messed up this old joke, which goes back at least to 1970 and may have originated in Japan. Or maybe Dick messed it up and you quoted him accurately...

"The original story goes like this: The fully automated factory of the future employs only one man and a dog. The dog is there to make sure the man doesn't touch anything, and the man is there to feed the dog."

"Your "critic" has the joke right. And, I did not originate. A good story is never improved by the truth."

You might be interested in some of my "improvements”: 1/ the man was there to supervise the factory, and the dog to assure that the man does not touch anything. 2/ The man was there to represent the human unions....

After reading the story on brain-machine interface and "technohumans" (eNews August 17, ’01), my son David Pinto [dave@davepinto.com] sent this:

"All your musing got me thinking about this. Spectacles and wheelchairs are all technology that makes humans more able. So it made me think that not too far in the future, when robot wheelchairs are more advanced, it might be possible to hook one up for a paraplegic, with links directly to the brain. But perhaps the weight of the complete body would be a bit too much, so the whole thing would work better if the body were removed. Imagine a person whose body is completely useless; if it was possible to hook this person's brain to an artificial life support robot that could walk and dance as well as you or I, wouldn't a paraplegic want it? Now, would that person be less human just because his body was gone?

"So, reading this to Surya (David’s wife), she says: "Of course he's less human!" When I pushed further, she also said that in her view, a man with prosthetic legs is less human. But, does that mean he has any less rights? Can he still vote? I dare say he'd be allowed to vote. And not just in Florida...."

"Jim, I'm surprised that so many people are just hearing about the iBOT now. I recall seeing a television piece on it at least two years ago, and I remember feeling so frustrated that it couldn't be sold without FDA approval. As far as I was concerned it should no more require FDA approval than a car, a skateboard or a bicycle. If I was paralyzed I would have paid anything for one, it was that amazing.

"When the hype surrounding Ginger (IT) first arose, Kamen was referred to as an inventor "who had invented an advanced wheelchair capable of climbing stairs" a description that hardly does justice to the sheer magnificence of the iBOT. Once I realized that this was the wheelchair I had seen, I figured that however revolutionary IT was claimed to be, it probably was. I still look forward to its unveiling."

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