I, after a few moments of doubt, decided to give the beta (and therefore free) trial of T9 Nav a go. T9 Nav is made by the same company - Nuance Communications - as T9 predictive text itself, and starts there. It's essentially a desktop search tool, for those of you who are familiar with that notion, and what it does is give you fast access to (theoretically - caveats apply) all content on the phone, from the home screen. It handles the fast part by building an index of all applications, bookmarks, documents, media files etc. This sounds scarily as though it'll bog the phone down and make it run at a crawl, but only takes a few seconds while you watch.
The cool part is how it handles the access part. Simply start typing, using normal T9 rules, and voila! A list of all matching content will be displayed upon the screen. If you are dialling a number, simply ignore the results, finish the number and hit dial. It learns, too - just like a proper implementation of T9, the results you select most often become favoured and are put at the top of the list.
This works so well, it's amazing. I admit to skepticism to begin with, but colour me a convert. The first advantage will be obvious to anybody who has used an S60 phone - it bypasses a messy and faintly arbitrary menu structure and goes straight to your result. But it also taps into an existing (assuming you have it) skillset, using automated and therefore rapid text entry instead of a clunky menu-up-left etc. selection.
For example: To get to MobiReader in my heavily customised menu structure, I could enter Menu-down-select-down-select-select, and that can only be done smoothly through repetition. Or, I could type mob(662)-down-select. Now which one seems easier to you? Finding the unit converter, which I have used a couple of times lately but have no idea where it lives in the menus, would take of a fair few seconds and a bit of head-scratching (is it in the Office folder??), or I could just do conv(2668)-down-select.
It's brilliant.
Okay, it's not perfect. Yes, it is still in beta and it does have issues. Several commentators have mentioned that it doesn't seen to index the music player, but I have noticed that neither does it index Sync, nor index text files, such as this one, and I still have to go through a file browser (yes, I'm compiling this on the phone).
At this point, I have to admit that it's not unique, and that the company responsible for T9 doesn't even seem to have been the first to think of this implementation. If you want a program that isn't still in beta, try the ludicrously named SkyeQuiKey from SkyeStream. These people have obviously never struck upon the idea of product names that are easy to google for. SkyeQuiKey is not free - and I'm expecting that when T9 Nav comes out of beta it'll no longer be free either - and although there is a trial period, it's the amazingly useless 1 day.
I'm sticking with the free T9 Nav until it tries to charge me for it. At that point, I will be hard pressed indeed to not shell out for it.
Link to T9 Nav website
Link to SkyeQuiKey website
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Dear eBay
For the love of whatever deity you care about, stop putting buttons into emails - just use links. If people are sensible enough to choose not to display images within html emails because, you know, it's a serious security risk and deeply annoying, the buttons don't work.
Thank you.
Monday, 18 August 2008
Battery "sulfation": An investigation into rip-off technology
For pretty much all of what I refer to as my self-guided education in science and skeptical thinking, I have been fascinated by medical and biological claims. After all, that's the reason I started - I needed to educate myself so that I could provide educated information to my clients.
Recently, I've looked more closely into climate change. But evolution, medicine and climate have been the most entertaining and interesting avenues of investigation.
Here's a little episode, however, which illustrates that investigative skills, a good grounding in science and common sense, along with a skeptical thinking toolkit which includes conspiracy-theory-spotting techniques, will stand you in good stead in almost any situation. I had originally written this in an email, but I resurrected it, dusted it off, expanded it and produced this for your interest, education and profit:
Almost a year ago now, I was involved (I started it) in a battery thread on a bike forum. The basic outcome was that I ended up knowing more than I used to: vis, that a battery can die sporadically and not all at once, which was the common knowledge around me at the time. However in this thread somebody, having demonstrated that they didn't know how to answer a question and couldn't be trusted to keep track of what's going on, mentioned that people should buy a particular brand of trickle-charger which uses rapidly alternating current to shake free sulfation on the battery plates and extends the life of the battery. I come back to this now because I have just seen similar claims from a motorbike website reviewing a product they didn't understand (by the way, this is called "parroting" not "journalism").
Now, I am not a physical chemist, engineer or anything of the sort. But I remember enough of chemistry and have, I hope, enough common sense knowledge of physics, for alarm bells to have gone off when I read this.
Rule Number One: What are they talking about?
I went off to look at the website for this fancy trickle-charger, and in the FAQs it explained that the build-up of sulfates on the plates kills batteries and that when they are "shaken free" they will dissolve back into solution.
Huh?
Rule Number Two: Try and understand the science involved.
Point one: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted. In generators, mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy. In a lead-acid (and any other) "battery", chemical energy is converted into electrical energy. Specifically, you have lead plates with a solution of sulfuric acid surrounding them. This is an unstable situation, and at the negative plate the hydrogen sulfate ions in solution react with the lead to produce lead sulfate, hydrogen, and a couple of spare electrons which, you may gather, is where the electrical current comes from. The positive plate is more complicated, but the summary is that lead oxide on the plate combines with hydrogen sulfate, hydroxide ions and a couple of electrons to produce lead sulfate and water. To charge the battery, force electrons through it backwards and everything is reversed.
You will note that as a result of this, "sulfate" is deposited on both battery plates as a result of the battery working properly and is removed during recharging. Bear this in mind as we read on.
Still on the manufacturer's website, I found this gem in the FAQ: it had "Why haven't I heard about Battery Life Saving technology?" and the answer was "The companies don't want you to know." Whoop! Whoop! Woo-alert! Paranoid conspiracy nut ahead! Abandon ship, abandon ship!
I can't stress this enough: That's not how the world works. Nobody is really competent enough to hide something like this when people are trying to sell you the technology. Physicists and chemists would be using them and recomending them to all their friends, for a start.
So:
Rule Number Three: Look for supporting or rebutting evidence.
I Googled and found the same information repeated ad nauseum by retailers and by people attempting to offer "advice" by regurgitating what they had just read (it is a really, really bad idea to take the word of a manufacturer as gospel). Tellingly, not a lot of actual evidence turned up highly ranked on Google results - just anecdotal reports (which isn't evidence - trust me on this) and endlessly repeating "apparently"'s and "I've heard that" and "They say".
Ah, but also the Battery Performance Research Institute. Now, that name alone is highly worrying. Doesn't sound like an independent, objective body, does it? And no, they're a consultancy firm. But they do explain sulfation as: Large crystals of elad sulfate will grow on the lead plates, which ultimately prevents the chemical reaction necessary for the current by tying up the reactants and preventing the acid reaching the lead.
That's a little more believable. But what to do about it, and why doesn't charging the battery get rid of the crystals? And if it doesn't, what are you trying to do about it?
Rule Number Four: Keep looking
By tacking "evidence" onto the Google search for "battery sulfation" I managed to find a fascinating little thread in a battery newsgroup hosted by a university in the USA, where a poster (this was from 6 years ago, so fuck-off trying to sell "unique, innovative technology") quoted an electro chemist as not just shooting this "sulfation causes battery failure" theory down in flames but comprehensively burying it at a crossroads at midnight with a steak through its heart and its head on display in a a bowl of holy water in the next county. Well, I exaggerate a little.
Essentially, although the formation of large lead sulfate crystals is a worry, it's only number three or four on the list:
"...sulfation is, by definition, irreversible. Once lead sulfate crystalizes and sheds from the plates of a battery, there is no way, electrically, chemically, or otherwise, to return it to the plates. The sulfation represents irretrievably lost capacity in one or more cells."
And to save me time, I will copy and past the information quoted from the chemist, one Nawaz Quershi who, apparently, worked for a couple of different battery companies. At the end is the executive summary from the quoting poster:
-- begin quoted text --
1. Normally, batteries do not fail from sulfation. They fail from the positive grid corrosion, but primarily from the positive plate active material (lead dioxide) shedding. The loss of this material means loss of capacity.
2. The positive plate loses its integrity by cycling: the crystal structure gets destroyed, a little bit at a time, until the particles get so small that they float away from the plate forming the sludge at the bottom of the cell.
3. During charge, when the lead dioxide particles, floating around in the acid, touch the negative plate, they convert (plate out) into lead metal dendrites which grow towards the positive plate, eventually creating a short. This is also called mossing.
4. During discharge both of the electrodes (lead dioxide and spongy lead) convert to lead sulfate, reversing upon re-charge. So lead sulfate formation is a necessary condition for the battery to function.
5. If you let a battery sit for 6 months or more, the self discharge reactions occur very slowly, forming very large lead sulfate crystals. Since lead sulfate is an electronic insulator, they do not convert (recharge) easily. This rather pathological condition is called sulfation. Normal operation of the battery should not and does not cause this condition unless you operate your batteries in significantly undercharged condition (mismatched charger?).
-- end quoted text --
In short, unless you allow your batteries to sit unmaintained for many months at a stretch, or unless your charger's output is much too low, sulfation is not as much of a problem as it's made out to be. (This was news to me too. For many years I believed what I'd read -- that sulfation was the main cause of lost capacity.)
So, in other words:
No battery will last for ever, learn to accept that. On the other hand, not using a battery is bad for it. Don't let it drain too low, don't put the wrong charger on it, keep cycling it. There's not a lot you can do about gradual degradation except (maybe) buy a better quality battery to begin with, and get a charger which can do an "equalisation charge" which gets each individual cell to the same charge and prevents too much stress on any of them. In fact, the evidence is that any good work done by a "desulfater" is through an equalisation charge which is a side-effect of the way they operate.
Rule Number Five: Reality is usually more complicated than that - there are no simple answers.
What you can, therefore, do to keep your automotive batteries happy is to use them. There are chargers which will do equalisation charging and which will maintain battery life by slowly discharging and recharging if you leave them plugged in. Get one of those if you must but, purely on the theory of "don't encourage the bastards", don't buy a desulfater.
References and links:
The chemistry of lead-acid batteries from Av8n.com
The thread on the Tufts Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University mailing lists.
Battery Performance Institute "Desulfation"
Recently, I've looked more closely into climate change. But evolution, medicine and climate have been the most entertaining and interesting avenues of investigation.
Here's a little episode, however, which illustrates that investigative skills, a good grounding in science and common sense, along with a skeptical thinking toolkit which includes conspiracy-theory-spotting techniques, will stand you in good stead in almost any situation. I had originally written this in an email, but I resurrected it, dusted it off, expanded it and produced this for your interest, education and profit:
Almost a year ago now, I was involved (I started it) in a battery thread on a bike forum. The basic outcome was that I ended up knowing more than I used to: vis, that a battery can die sporadically and not all at once, which was the common knowledge around me at the time. However in this thread somebody, having demonstrated that they didn't know how to answer a question and couldn't be trusted to keep track of what's going on, mentioned that people should buy a particular brand of trickle-charger which uses rapidly alternating current to shake free sulfation on the battery plates and extends the life of the battery. I come back to this now because I have just seen similar claims from a motorbike website reviewing a product they didn't understand (by the way, this is called "parroting" not "journalism").
Now, I am not a physical chemist, engineer or anything of the sort. But I remember enough of chemistry and have, I hope, enough common sense knowledge of physics, for alarm bells to have gone off when I read this.
Rule Number One: What are they talking about?
I went off to look at the website for this fancy trickle-charger, and in the FAQs it explained that the build-up of sulfates on the plates kills batteries and that when they are "shaken free" they will dissolve back into solution.
Huh?
Rule Number Two: Try and understand the science involved.
Point one: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted. In generators, mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy. In a lead-acid (and any other) "battery", chemical energy is converted into electrical energy. Specifically, you have lead plates with a solution of sulfuric acid surrounding them. This is an unstable situation, and at the negative plate the hydrogen sulfate ions in solution react with the lead to produce lead sulfate, hydrogen, and a couple of spare electrons which, you may gather, is where the electrical current comes from. The positive plate is more complicated, but the summary is that lead oxide on the plate combines with hydrogen sulfate, hydroxide ions and a couple of electrons to produce lead sulfate and water. To charge the battery, force electrons through it backwards and everything is reversed.
You will note that as a result of this, "sulfate" is deposited on both battery plates as a result of the battery working properly and is removed during recharging. Bear this in mind as we read on.
Still on the manufacturer's website, I found this gem in the FAQ: it had "Why haven't I heard about Battery Life Saving technology?" and the answer was "The companies don't want you to know." Whoop! Whoop! Woo-alert! Paranoid conspiracy nut ahead! Abandon ship, abandon ship!
I can't stress this enough: That's not how the world works. Nobody is really competent enough to hide something like this when people are trying to sell you the technology. Physicists and chemists would be using them and recomending them to all their friends, for a start.
So:
Rule Number Three: Look for supporting or rebutting evidence.
I Googled and found the same information repeated ad nauseum by retailers and by people attempting to offer "advice" by regurgitating what they had just read (it is a really, really bad idea to take the word of a manufacturer as gospel). Tellingly, not a lot of actual evidence turned up highly ranked on Google results - just anecdotal reports (which isn't evidence - trust me on this) and endlessly repeating "apparently"'s and "I've heard that" and "They say".
Ah, but also the Battery Performance Research Institute. Now, that name alone is highly worrying. Doesn't sound like an independent, objective body, does it? And no, they're a consultancy firm. But they do explain sulfation as: Large crystals of elad sulfate will grow on the lead plates, which ultimately prevents the chemical reaction necessary for the current by tying up the reactants and preventing the acid reaching the lead.
That's a little more believable. But what to do about it, and why doesn't charging the battery get rid of the crystals? And if it doesn't, what are you trying to do about it?
Rule Number Four: Keep looking
By tacking "evidence" onto the Google search for "battery sulfation" I managed to find a fascinating little thread in a battery newsgroup hosted by a university in the USA, where a poster (this was from 6 years ago, so fuck-off trying to sell "unique, innovative technology") quoted an electro chemist as not just shooting this "sulfation causes battery failure" theory down in flames but comprehensively burying it at a crossroads at midnight with a steak through its heart and its head on display in a a bowl of holy water in the next county. Well, I exaggerate a little.
Essentially, although the formation of large lead sulfate crystals is a worry, it's only number three or four on the list:
"...sulfation is, by definition, irreversible. Once lead sulfate crystalizes and sheds from the plates of a battery, there is no way, electrically, chemically, or otherwise, to return it to the plates. The sulfation represents irretrievably lost capacity in one or more cells."
And to save me time, I will copy and past the information quoted from the chemist, one Nawaz Quershi who, apparently, worked for a couple of different battery companies. At the end is the executive summary from the quoting poster:
-- begin quoted text --
1. Normally, batteries do not fail from sulfation. They fail from the positive grid corrosion, but primarily from the positive plate active material (lead dioxide) shedding. The loss of this material means loss of capacity.
2. The positive plate loses its integrity by cycling: the crystal structure gets destroyed, a little bit at a time, until the particles get so small that they float away from the plate forming the sludge at the bottom of the cell.
3. During charge, when the lead dioxide particles, floating around in the acid, touch the negative plate, they convert (plate out) into lead metal dendrites which grow towards the positive plate, eventually creating a short. This is also called mossing.
4. During discharge both of the electrodes (lead dioxide and spongy lead) convert to lead sulfate, reversing upon re-charge. So lead sulfate formation is a necessary condition for the battery to function.
5. If you let a battery sit for 6 months or more, the self discharge reactions occur very slowly, forming very large lead sulfate crystals. Since lead sulfate is an electronic insulator, they do not convert (recharge) easily. This rather pathological condition is called sulfation. Normal operation of the battery should not and does not cause this condition unless you operate your batteries in significantly undercharged condition (mismatched charger?).
-- end quoted text --
In short, unless you allow your batteries to sit unmaintained for many months at a stretch, or unless your charger's output is much too low, sulfation is not as much of a problem as it's made out to be. (This was news to me too. For many years I believed what I'd read -- that sulfation was the main cause of lost capacity.)
So, in other words:
No battery will last for ever, learn to accept that. On the other hand, not using a battery is bad for it. Don't let it drain too low, don't put the wrong charger on it, keep cycling it. There's not a lot you can do about gradual degradation except (maybe) buy a better quality battery to begin with, and get a charger which can do an "equalisation charge" which gets each individual cell to the same charge and prevents too much stress on any of them. In fact, the evidence is that any good work done by a "desulfater" is through an equalisation charge which is a side-effect of the way they operate.
Rule Number Five: Reality is usually more complicated than that - there are no simple answers.
What you can, therefore, do to keep your automotive batteries happy is to use them. There are chargers which will do equalisation charging and which will maintain battery life by slowly discharging and recharging if you leave them plugged in. Get one of those if you must but, purely on the theory of "don't encourage the bastards", don't buy a desulfater.
References and links:
The chemistry of lead-acid batteries from Av8n.com
The thread on the Tufts Institute of Cosmology, Tufts University mailing lists.
Battery Performance Institute "Desulfation"
Friday, 15 August 2008
Notes from the N95: v4
Another collection of random notes from the new smartphone, composed on the phone:
I must have just about done everything: it's been more than a week now without seeing something new. But I suppose there's always something else:
When using the phone in landscape mode, it is still possible for the display to go to screensaver mode. At which point the strip displaying the time and date, which is just visible in a good light, stays determinedly portrait in orientation. Oversight?
This is an odd one: I am using a very black theme from Taieb, and Dedit uses it's own interface, and a little bit of testing revealed that this problem is entirely a problem between these two: when T9 enters "spell a new word" mode in Dedit, the text is white on white. Which makes life a bit difficult.
More about the red key: I've noted it's frustrating inconsistencies before in these notes. I have just, the other day, had to rewrite a Livejournal entry I was writing in Lifeblog twice, because I accidentally hit the red key instead of the C back-space key, which it's right next to. This is VERY ANNOYING.
The icon for the Settings menu is a spanner. But it's got square jaws, not hexagonal. I hope this doesn't reflect the quality of the programming.
What the frack is a "visual radio"? Apart from, say, a standard radio that does exactly the same job of letting you listen to what is, after all, an auditory medium?
I can not help but notice that the full QWERTY keyboard E71 has a form of learning predictive text. Come on, guys, put this in an update for the N95, please?
When going into the settings for the camera, there is a choice of four different shutter sounds, which is nice to have. But changing the setting doesn't play the sound to let you know what it's like. Which is annoying. You need to actually take a photo to find out. This is not friendly behaviour.
Also on the subject of the camera tone: you can't turn it off. You're not allowed to. This has, apparently, come from privacy concerns. But it's bloody annoying. Not only for the obvious reasons where it's okay to take photos but it's not polite to make noises while doing so, but also because I am now using my N95, with it's nice big 5MP camera, as a scanner, taking photos of text books for reading later. It works quite well, but I'd really rather not be going CLICK every page inside a library.
I an currently trialing Opera Mobile, the made-for-S60 version, next to the java Opera Mini that I already use. Mobile is not free, but there is a trial period of 30 days. Which is good, because I'm not sure that it's actually as good as the free one. The first time I used it it was painfully slow, but I don't think that was Opera's fault. However the navigation within pages is, although slicker and fancier, not actually as useful. The front page is less useful. Navigation short-cuts are less useful. It doesn't offer you multiple search engines off the home page - just google. It doesn't have a clock. Now, some of this may be me not investing the time in learning it and customising it. But some of it is actually less functions, or more difficult to access functions. Which, combined with not actually loading or working any faster than the non-native java version, in fact working slightly slower, has me scratching my head over why I would want to pay for it.
This is a little weird: there are fields in different applications where, sensibly, text entry defaults to predictive off. But in the various bits of Contacts, it defaults to predictive on. Come on, what's the chance that the dictionary holds all the names you'll need and, more to the point, email addresses? There are some extremely non-language addresses out there, and many contractions that lead to REALLY non dictionary words. This doesn't seem to me to be the most effective default.
At the beginning of this installment of Notes From The New Smartphone, I noted that I may have just about found everything. In retrospect, I may have been wrong about that.
I must have just about done everything: it's been more than a week now without seeing something new. But I suppose there's always something else:
When using the phone in landscape mode, it is still possible for the display to go to screensaver mode. At which point the strip displaying the time and date, which is just visible in a good light, stays determinedly portrait in orientation. Oversight?
This is an odd one: I am using a very black theme from Taieb, and Dedit uses it's own interface, and a little bit of testing revealed that this problem is entirely a problem between these two: when T9 enters "spell a new word" mode in Dedit, the text is white on white. Which makes life a bit difficult.
More about the red key: I've noted it's frustrating inconsistencies before in these notes. I have just, the other day, had to rewrite a Livejournal entry I was writing in Lifeblog twice, because I accidentally hit the red key instead of the C back-space key, which it's right next to. This is VERY ANNOYING.
The icon for the Settings menu is a spanner. But it's got square jaws, not hexagonal. I hope this doesn't reflect the quality of the programming.
What the frack is a "visual radio"? Apart from, say, a standard radio that does exactly the same job of letting you listen to what is, after all, an auditory medium?
I can not help but notice that the full QWERTY keyboard E71 has a form of learning predictive text. Come on, guys, put this in an update for the N95, please?
When going into the settings for the camera, there is a choice of four different shutter sounds, which is nice to have. But changing the setting doesn't play the sound to let you know what it's like. Which is annoying. You need to actually take a photo to find out. This is not friendly behaviour.
Also on the subject of the camera tone: you can't turn it off. You're not allowed to. This has, apparently, come from privacy concerns. But it's bloody annoying. Not only for the obvious reasons where it's okay to take photos but it's not polite to make noises while doing so, but also because I am now using my N95, with it's nice big 5MP camera, as a scanner, taking photos of text books for reading later. It works quite well, but I'd really rather not be going CLICK every page inside a library.
I an currently trialing Opera Mobile, the made-for-S60 version, next to the java Opera Mini that I already use. Mobile is not free, but there is a trial period of 30 days. Which is good, because I'm not sure that it's actually as good as the free one. The first time I used it it was painfully slow, but I don't think that was Opera's fault. However the navigation within pages is, although slicker and fancier, not actually as useful. The front page is less useful. Navigation short-cuts are less useful. It doesn't offer you multiple search engines off the home page - just google. It doesn't have a clock. Now, some of this may be me not investing the time in learning it and customising it. But some of it is actually less functions, or more difficult to access functions. Which, combined with not actually loading or working any faster than the non-native java version, in fact working slightly slower, has me scratching my head over why I would want to pay for it.
This is a little weird: there are fields in different applications where, sensibly, text entry defaults to predictive off. But in the various bits of Contacts, it defaults to predictive on. Come on, what's the chance that the dictionary holds all the names you'll need and, more to the point, email addresses? There are some extremely non-language addresses out there, and many contractions that lead to REALLY non dictionary words. This doesn't seem to me to be the most effective default.
At the beginning of this installment of Notes From The New Smartphone, I noted that I may have just about found everything. In retrospect, I may have been wrong about that.
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Things Operating Systems need to be able to do
Force applications to quit, using extreme prejudice if necessary. It appears that XP can not do this.
I have just lost five minutes of my dwindling life, which felt of course like half an hour, because Internet Exploder 7 took 400MB of memory and then froze, and refused to be immediately killed. During this time I couldn't switch to anything else, "else" being the database that I was just having to rebuild, thankfully not before I had put more than 7 entries into it.
Luckily, I get to go home soon.
I have just lost five minutes of my dwindling life, which felt of course like half an hour, because Internet Exploder 7 took 400MB of memory and then froze, and refused to be immediately killed. During this time I couldn't switch to anything else, "else" being the database that I was just having to rebuild, thankfully not before I had put more than 7 entries into it.
Luckily, I get to go home soon.
The grey goo that fuelled, fed, and fixed the world
The history of science fiction is replete with technology big and, over time, increasingly small. Some of the most recognised recent work has been, like Neal Stephenson's steam-punk/cyber-punk crossover The Diamond Age, fundamentally a story about nanotechnology and it's potential uses, with the "grey goo" argument replaced by lung-threatening grey dust when nanobots war with each other.
Bioengineering has not, in my admittedly limited experience, been treated nearly as well. In fact, with the exception of the odd throw-away setup like a branch of homo sapiens engineered for heavy gravity worlds (Anne McAffrey), most of the interesting biological discussions happened decades away with Frank Herbert (across most of his books, not just the Dune epic) and Isacc Asimov.
Which leads me neatly to where I was intending to go: Asimov constructed a world in which the Earth is essentially a giant metal sphere, all living done in built-up catacombs because there's no space on the surface left, and all food produced by - wait for it - yeast beds. Yeast as food found other expression in several of Asimov's books and short stories, including one in which a chef introduced actual garlic into a culinary competition instead of using the several hundred flavoured varieties of yeast available, and was ostracised when he announced it (N.B.: If this wasn't actually Asimov, please correct me).
The problem is that, despite the obvious potential for micro-organisms, which are so efficient at turning food materials into themselves when they don't have to build supporting structures and internal organs that are difficult to make productive (unless they get fed back into the process as food materials, hello prion diseases...), their potential appears to have been neglected by the science fiction community. Maybe the idea isn't sexy or shiny enough.
Actual science, however, now there's another thing entirely! Observe: 10 Ways Genetically Engineered Microbes Could Help Humanity (Discover Magazine). Ten ways is a bit of a stretch - there are four different ways of fighting disease alone - but this is seriously cool science. Constructing microbes to produce medicines is good but not particularly surprising. Engineering yeast that is much better at producing ethanol is interesting and has serious commercial potential in the current climate, and producing petroleum products instead of the corrosive and inefficient ethanol is much cooler again (we can get biodiesel straight from palms and rapeseed [that's Canola, in case you weren't aware] and hemp seeds, can we get biodiesel from random organic material via microbes? Please?)
But I think that my favourite from the entire list is the last one. Microbes have been enginered that can produce proteins that can attach to metals at stress points. I repeat, that attach to metals at stress points. This is seriously cool. A merging of organic and inorganic like this, bio-metallurgy if you will, is much more exciting than doing the same thing with nanomachines, and not much less exciting than producing nanomachines that can detect stress points on airplane wings in flight and enact running repairs in sub-zero temperatures and constantly fluctuating stresses.
Keep it up, I say, keep it up.
Bioengineering has not, in my admittedly limited experience, been treated nearly as well. In fact, with the exception of the odd throw-away setup like a branch of homo sapiens engineered for heavy gravity worlds (Anne McAffrey), most of the interesting biological discussions happened decades away with Frank Herbert (across most of his books, not just the Dune epic) and Isacc Asimov.
Which leads me neatly to where I was intending to go: Asimov constructed a world in which the Earth is essentially a giant metal sphere, all living done in built-up catacombs because there's no space on the surface left, and all food produced by - wait for it - yeast beds. Yeast as food found other expression in several of Asimov's books and short stories, including one in which a chef introduced actual garlic into a culinary competition instead of using the several hundred flavoured varieties of yeast available, and was ostracised when he announced it (N.B.: If this wasn't actually Asimov, please correct me).
The problem is that, despite the obvious potential for micro-organisms, which are so efficient at turning food materials into themselves when they don't have to build supporting structures and internal organs that are difficult to make productive (unless they get fed back into the process as food materials, hello prion diseases...), their potential appears to have been neglected by the science fiction community. Maybe the idea isn't sexy or shiny enough.
Actual science, however, now there's another thing entirely! Observe: 10 Ways Genetically Engineered Microbes Could Help Humanity (Discover Magazine). Ten ways is a bit of a stretch - there are four different ways of fighting disease alone - but this is seriously cool science. Constructing microbes to produce medicines is good but not particularly surprising. Engineering yeast that is much better at producing ethanol is interesting and has serious commercial potential in the current climate, and producing petroleum products instead of the corrosive and inefficient ethanol is much cooler again (we can get biodiesel straight from palms and rapeseed [that's Canola, in case you weren't aware] and hemp seeds, can we get biodiesel from random organic material via microbes? Please?)
But I think that my favourite from the entire list is the last one. Microbes have been enginered that can produce proteins that can attach to metals at stress points. I repeat, that attach to metals at stress points. This is seriously cool. A merging of organic and inorganic like this, bio-metallurgy if you will, is much more exciting than doing the same thing with nanomachines, and not much less exciting than producing nanomachines that can detect stress points on airplane wings in flight and enact running repairs in sub-zero temperatures and constantly fluctuating stresses.
Keep it up, I say, keep it up.
Design 1: Content 0.
I am not a big fan of ABC's online news site. They just don't seem to understand the Internet: No external links is the big one, even on stories which are trumpeting a big new free online public health initiative which readers then have to go and find for themselves. They can even spend a page talking a free telephone service without once mentioning the number. All of which is not only a failure to understand online journalism, it's a failure of basic good journalism. The best they do is link to their own related content, including multimedia. Which is a start.
But, although the journalists and editors might be a bit slack, someone clearly has a good idea or two. I just hit the "Print" link on one story with an embedded photo, and got a little dialogue "Print Options: Include Photo" with a check-box and an OK and a Cancel. Which is a rather nice touch. Well done the web developer.
Now can the content developers catch up, please?
Link to ABC News Online
But, although the journalists and editors might be a bit slack, someone clearly has a good idea or two. I just hit the "Print" link on one story with an embedded photo, and got a little dialogue "Print Options: Include Photo" with a check-box and an OK and a Cancel. Which is a rather nice touch. Well done the web developer.
Now can the content developers catch up, please?
Link to ABC News Online
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