Tech of the year 2004
TRN published its top picks for the Technology Research Advances of 2004. this is worth a careful read.
Dan Huard's blog was picked up on Slashdot. Upshot: G4TechTV blows (more than ever). So there you go. More interesting was this comment to the thread:
Sciencey things your science channel has missed in the last two years: Cloning animals, finalizing the human codon search, new fundamental particles, new states of matter, the stem cell debate, half a dozen governmental-level beliefs about what's going on with our environment, two near-misses from asteroids large enough to threaten the ecosphere, three potential global plagues, the closure of one of the clay institute math problems, two major developments in number theory, a polynomial time algorithm for determining primality, the development of silicon on insulator chip doping, a refactoring of the mechanisms believed to underlie gravity and the suggestion that gravity may be blocked by not one, not two, but three seperate mechanisms in three seperate sets of reproducible studies, the first application of an antiviral agent to humanity as developed by large-scale simulation, various public policy issues regarding monitoring especially but not solely after 9/11, the food shortage on the international space station, the development of transparent transistors, OLED, a solid year of functional transmissions from two seperate self-powered agents on Mars, the experimental suggestion of subatomic-scale selection mechanisms, a robot lab entering the orbit of one of the moons of saturn, rollable solar cells, the commercial development of space, the ESA's support for a space elevator, the first grown and functioning human heart, the Jetson promise of home utility robots, stem-cell based reversal of paralyzing spinal injury, the drop of the home machine fabricator beneath not just the $50k but also beneath the $10k mark, the introduction of the first three major space powers since the 1970s, and the first time Bush has ever come through on one of his grandiose research promises.
Maybe I'll get the time to annotate this. I missed the story on the gravity-blocking mechanisms and I can't get google to spit anything up.
Other recent slashposts worth noting:
Inside the Shadow Internet. Wired article. Another Jeff Howe "lookit me, I know the dark side" breathless Kevin's Kool piece. Summary: P2P wouldn't be seeded with the best media and warez if it weren't for the topsites. Topsites are funded by the angels. Wa-wa.
Safecracking for the Computer Scientist. (PDF). Decent consideration of niche physical security and potential application to CompSci. More focused in this topic than the old stalwart from Anderson. I need to take a look at Ross's current position on trusted computing now that palladium/NGSCB's been killed off in the dotnet elephant stampede.
Space Stories: More SpaceShipTwo Details (BBC), NASA Prepares to Launch Comet-Buster (Deep Impact), New and Improved SETI (Space.com), Cassini Shows Close Up of Iapetus (JPL image).
A consortium of communications companies got together to increase 3G speed by a factor of 10. Maybe we'll see something working by 2010. Speech recognition on large-screen handheld devices connected to video-capable broadband will not only make it possible to have a voice-activated Tivo experience everywhere, it will make it possible to have everything you're about intellectually (or, more likely "pop-culturally") with you at all times. Here's the scoop: If you have an always-on 100 Mbit connection to your little handheld, you don't care about how much hard-drive space it has (although by 2010, it'll be a lot). You can stream videos, music and books from your home base (which may be your 2010 ISP or google, which already gives everyone a gig), so you won't need iTunes to sync the stuff to your device. Your calendar, email, voicemail and all that jazz should be much easier to unify. There's more, but I should feed the horses.
