Sunday, December 14, 2014

"The most complex machine ever constructed by humankind"

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is gearing up for a new research phase in the new year. What secrets will be revealed about particle physics and the structure of the universe as we know it? Stay tuned, the next three years are likely to be ground-breaking!

Thursday, August 7, 2014

The Memristor - Putting Moore's law back on track

Haven't heard much at large from HP Labs until this, which I heard Meg Whitman reference several times in a recent talk she gave. Likely this puts the AI evolutionary curve back on track, perhaps making the extrapolation discussed in Louis Del Monte's book increasingly plausible :-)

Thursday, July 10, 2014

The Singularity is only 30 years away, are you ready?

Many futurists predict the singularity is only 30 years away. For sure, there will be far more change in the next 40 years than in the previous to date. I sure hope the AIs, soon to be with us, choose to prefer Asimov's three laws more than "SkyNet" or "the Matrix". As discussed in a recent article, physicist and author Louis Del Monte speculates that they will surpass, and eventually become annoyed with us (yikes!) I've picked up a copy and started reading Del Monte's book to learn more about his perspective.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Integrated or Independent QA?

A friend at work forwarded this article to me after a lunch time discussion about QA testing, and whether it should be integrated within the development team activities or operate as an independent effort.

The author's viewpoint is that there is value in a separate team and effort.

I think there’s a parallel to scientific method, too, which makes QA as a separate process valuable. Review by a different team, that corroborates readiness through their own effort, is important for overall confidence, too. Not to say that’s infallible, but it demonstrates an important watermark.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Signatures from the Big Bang

Pretty big stuff! Nine years of observations produce evidence that subliminal imprints of gravitational waves from the Big Bang are present in the free radiation of space, as Einstein predicted should be the case. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity working at the same scale, possibly a step forward to a real Unified Theory.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Are we ready for the impact of robots?

The military is one front where disruptive technologies (such as the Internet itself) first appear and "proof of concept" is established. So, it's rather sobering to see how fast plans for deploying robotics in the military are progressing - likely starting with supply couriers.

In my opinion, it's just a matter of time before orchestrated platoons of robotic soldiers become feasible. There are already significant strides being made in environmental sensors and muscle emulation, which will help such units to integrate with human troops while becoming a real pain in the posterior for opposing forces.

Such platoons are scary. They might become sold and leveraged into essentially unassailable mercenary forces, highly efficient killing units, for better or worse. And, there is the approaching singularity where robots (and possibly AIs) will start building robots, too, making easy proliferation another challenge. Hmm, are Terminators and SkyNet on the eventual horizon? Let's hope not!

Monday, December 30, 2013

Robots invade kitchens in Portugal

Here's an interesting article about practical application of robotics in the home that's developing a strong demand and following in Portugal and Europe. Not available in the U.S. yet, but I think it will likely do well here, too.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Google solidly plants its stake in Robotics

Search may have sparked Google's beginning but it's now moving hard and fast into Robotics. With this week's acquisition of Boston Dynamics, and several earlier Robotics related acquisitions, Google is positioning itself as a major player in the field.

Scary? Perhaps. I find it somewhat anxiety-raising when one large company moves to put itself in the significant position to call the shots - hopefully they'll remember that motto, "Do no evil!"

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Removing old Ubuntu kernels easily

Ubuntu doesn't automatically remove old kernel packages, so over time the number of unused kernel packages will build up. On recent releases, you could manually use the graphical UI of the Synaptic Package Manager (SPM) to locate and remove the old packages, but as of the Ubuntu Saucy Salamander release the SPM is no longer available.

However, there's a neat way to do it directly from the command line or a shell script, too. See this Ubuntu Forum article for details.