Geek Stuff – Page 3 – A Geek With Guns

Writing Circuits

Good-bye, breadboard. Scientists at the University of Illinois have come up with a conductive, water-based ink that lets you draw working circuits on an ordinary piece of paper. They’ve packaged the product into a rollerball pen, called Circuit Scribe, and if you want to be one of the first to get hold of one, the team is crowdfunding the project on Kickstarter right now.

A pen that can draw working circuit pathways? That’s pretty damn cool. In fact I can think of several practical jokes involving conductive ink. On a less nefarious note, these things would have been a ton of fun in my college electronic classes.

WristCoin

You’re going to notice a complete lack of new material here today. This is due to the fact that I spent last night putting the final touches on the initial design of an application I’m writing. A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Pebble wristwatch. If you haven’t heard of it it’s a wristwatch that connects to your smartphone via low powered Bluetooth and presents notifications in a manner that doesn’t involve digging your phone out. My interest in the device stems from the fact that it’s programmable.

For my first program on the watch I’ve decided to write a Bitcoin price checker. Since I’m horrible with names I’ve dubbed the application WristCoin. Obviously the application is still in the pre-alpha stage, which means it’s riddled with bugs and isn’t feature complete. But I’ve published the source code on GitHub if anybody is interested in following my progress.

WristCoin requires both the 2.0 beta Pebble firmware and the 2.0 beta Pebble smartphone application. In its current state WristCoin grabs prices off of Bitstamp and displays the last price on the Pebble. I will be adding more exchanges in the near future and the ability to bring up more detailed pricing information for each exchange. Progress on the application will heavily depend on my free time but it’s small and shouldn’t take a great deal of time.

The application, as you can guess based on my views regarding intellectual property, is public domain so you can do with it whatever you wish.

Boom or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

I have a sick fascination with nuclear weapons. They symbolize both the creative potential of humanity as well as its destructive capability. The fact that no country has used nuclear weapons since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also a testament to our species ability to exercise some amount of restraint in our pursuit of destruction. I came across a really interesting time lapse video of every nuclear weapon detonated in the world:

It really does look like a giant dick waving competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

An Engineering Mindset

You know you’re an engineer when you read the following article about the USS George Washington being deployed to the Philippines and your eyes jump to the listed carrier statistics:

Really? It has unlimited range? I didn’t realize our carriers could folding space and fucking time. I’m skeptical that a mere aircraft carrier could store enough energy to travel the distance from Earth to Pluto. Either the BBC acquired some very optimistic statistics from the manufacturer or the person who wrote the article has no idea what the word unlimited means.

The Beginning of the End for Pharmaceutical Monopolies

My love of 3D printer technology expands far beyond the firearms field. Being able to build complex things in the comfort of our own homes stands to upset the balance of power in many markets. One of the most valuable aspects of 3D printers is their ability to put an end to many monopolistic practices. If you’re able to download designs for an item and print it in your own home then patents become irrelevant, which is why this story about 3D printers capable of making drugs interests me:

He shows me the printer, a nondescript version of the £1,200 3D printer used in the Fab@Home project, which aims to bring self-fabrication to the masses. After a bit of trial and error, Cronin’s team discovered that it could use a bathroom sealant as a material to print reaction chambers of precisely specified dimensions, connected with tubes of different lengths and diameters. After the bespoke miniature lab had set hard, the printer could then inject the system reactants, or “chemical inks”, to create sequenced reactions.

The “inks” would be simple reagents, from which more complex molecules are formed. “If I was being facetious I would say that to find your inks you would go to the periodic table: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on,” Cronin says, “but obviously you can’t handle all those substances very well, so it would have to be a bit more complex than that. If you were looking to make a sugar, for example, you would start with your set of base sugars and mix them together. When we make complex molecules in the traditional way with test tubes and flasks, we start with a smaller number of simpler molecules.” As he points out, nearly all drugs are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin. “With a printer it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you can make any organic molecule,” he says.

The real beauty of Cronin’s prototype system, however, is that it allows the printer not only to control the sequences and exact calibration of inks, but also to shape, from a tested blueprint, the environment in which those reactions take place. The scale and architecture of the miniature printed “lab” could be pre-programmed into software and downloaded for use with a standard set of inks. In this way, not only the combinations of reactants but also the ratios and speed at which they combine could be ingrained into the system, simply by changing the size of reaction chambers and their relation with one another; Cronin calls this “reactionware” or, because it depends on a conceptualised sequence of flow and reorientation in a 3D space, “Rubik’s Cube chemistry”.

Large pharmaceutical companies enjoy an advantage in the medical field. They can patent chemical compounds and effectively enjoy a monopoly on producing that compound for two decades. During that two decade period the consequences of monopolies afflict everybody who wants or needs that drug. Namely the pharmaceutical company enjoys the ability to jack the price up to whatever it desires since no competition is allowed to enter the market until the patent expires. 3D printers capable of producing drugs could overcome this issue. Suddenly people capable of reverse engineering the drug (say, by looking up the patent and going from there) could post blueprints online for all to download.

Another potential for these printers is the ability to drastically lower the cost of developing new drugs. Individuals with the proper background could develop new drugs on their person computers and perform tests by printing the new drugs. The overall costs would likely drop considerably, which would almost certainly cause a major leap in innovation.

Call It Cynicism But I’m Calling Bullshit

Several sites are reporting about a tool aimed at performing denial of service attacks against Healthcare.gov:

Researchers have uncovered software available on the Internet designed to overload the struggling Healthcare.gov website with more traffic than it can handle.

“ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people,” a screenshot from the tool, which was acquired by researchers at Arbor Networks, declares. “We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience!”

My gut tells me that this is bullshit. In fact, being the cynical person I am, I wouldn’t be surprised if this tool was written by somebody involved in the development of Healthcare.gov. They’re on the hot seat at the moment and probably trying to find anything to blame besides themselves. Developing and releasing a tool aimed at performing a denial of service attack against Healthcare.gov would give the developers of the website something to blame.

I do have some reason to believe this tool wasn’t developed by opponents of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I have connections to numerous communities including groups that oppose the ACA. If this tool was really written as an act of civil disobedience against the ACA I would thinking the developers would want as many people to download it as possible. That would mean spreading the word to groups that oppose the ACA. I can’t find any mention of this tool in any of those groups.

So, for the time being, I’m calling bullshit on this.

Bad Science Leads to Bad Results

I’m sure you’ve seen the stories floating around that say scientists of proven that Oreo cookies are just as addictive as cocaine. At first this story gave me hope. I’ve eaten Oreo cookies but have never become addicted to them. If the research was correct that would indicate I could do cocaine without getting addicted. I admit, there are times when caffeine isn’t enough to keep me awake and it would be nice to know a nonaddictive, strong alternative exists for those times when I absolutely must stay awake. Sadly my hopes have been dashed. As it turns out, the research was bupkis:

Fox News reported that a “College study finds Oreo cookies are as addictive as drugs,” Forbes explained “Why Your Brain Treats Oreos Like a Drug,” and a ton of other sites ran with the story as well.

Here’s how the experiment, which has not been peer reviewed and has not been presented yet, went down. Mice were placed in a maze, with one end holding an Oreo and the other end holding a rice cake. The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture.

“Just like humans, rats don’t seem to get much pleasure out of eating them,” one of the researchers said in a press release, the same press release that says “Connecticut College students and a professor of neuroscience have found ‘America’s favorite cookie’ is just as addictive as cocaine.”

Bad science leads to bad results. Granted, this story set off my bullshit detector right away. Because of my suspicious nature I assumed that the research was performed by an anti-obesity group looking to demonize popular junk foods or by a competitor to Oreo cookies (probably from a company that offers healthier alternatives). As gun control groups have taught us, the results you want can be obtained so long as you right the criteria properly. But it turns out that this research wasn’t the result of some anti-obesity group or an Oreo competitor (that we know of), it was the result of a bad experiment. All the experiment demonstrated was that mice don’t care for rice cakes. I don’t blame them, I find them to be flavorless and unfilling as well.

Unfortunately, I’ll almost certainly see claims that Oreo cookies are as addictive as cocaine on Facebook for weeks to come. Incorrect information seems to disseminate faster than correct information. That’s probably because correct information is seldom makes for as good of a story as incorrect information.

3D Printing with Metal

In the pursuit of manufacturing everything with 3D printers, a material limitation has continuously been encountered. Unless you’re willing to purchase a very expensive machines. Research is beginning to take off in this area though, which means more affordable 3D printers capable of working with metals are on the horizon. One organization that is beginning to look into 3D printing with metals is the European Space Agency (ESA):

The European Space Agency has unveiled plans to “take 3D printing into the metal age” by building parts for jets, spacecraft and fusion projects.

The Amaze project brings together 28 institutions to develop new metal components which are lighter, stronger and cheaper than conventional parts.

What’s interesting about the ESA’s pursuit is that it intends to manufacture parts capable of surviving high stress environments such as jet engines. One of the limitations of 3D printing with metal currently is the fact that printed metal parts tend to be weaker than mental parts created through other manufacturing techniques. If the ESA can create printed metal parts that are nearly as strong as metal parts created through other means we could be on the verge of something wonderful.

Obviously my interest is partially focused on firearms technology. I would love to live in a world where any state law against firearm ownership could be bypassed by the press of a button on a 3D printer. We’re at the early stages of such a world but the material limitations of current consumer 3D printers is providing some difficulties. Once that limitation is overcome we can print reliable firearms without the state having any knowledge.

Bitcoin as a Commodity Backed Money

One of the more heated debates going on in Austrian economics circles is whether or not Bitcoin is a currency backed by a commodity. Proponents of Bitcoin claim it is while opponents claim it is not. I fall into the former camp. I also believe that latter camp suffers from a misunderstanding of what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin, above all else, is a network. The network is maintained by computing power. Disagreements within the Bitcoin network are resolved by going with whatever 50% + 1 of the computing power says. Who gets the Bitcoin when the same Bitcoin is sent to two addresses at the same time (something that could happen if the blockchain gets split)? Whoever 50% + 1 of the Bitcoin network’s computing power says it goes to. Furthermore, new Bitcoin can only be mined through the efforts of a great amount of computing power.

A commodity is nothing more than a raw material that can be bought and sold. Computing power is a commodity as it is a raw material needed to produce many of the goods we enjoy today and it can be bought and sold. One example of a good that is created using computing power is an encrypted communique. In order to encrypt a communique you need pass the plain text through algorithms that tend to be computationally complex. Computing power is also a resource that is bought and sold. When you sign up for an Amazon EC2 instance you’re buying computing power from Amazon. Just as a jeweler buys gold and turns it into jewelry that is later bought, Amazon buys computers from manufacturers that is later rented by people who don’t want to sink that much money into hardware they may only need temporarily.

The computing power put towards maintaining the Bitcoin network could be put to other tasks. Instead of participating in the Bitcoin network somebody could throw their computing power at Folding@Home or SETI@Home. But a lot of people have thrown their limited computing power behind Bitcoin. In fact, the processing power used to maintain the Bitcoin network outperforms the top 500 supercomputers combined. On top of personal hardware, many people are willing to rent your their mining hardware in the form of shares. You can buy into Bitcoin mining pools. The money you use to buy in is generally put towards more mining hardware and you are paid dividends based on the amount of Bitcoin mined.

Bitcoin, through the computing power necessary to maintain the network, is backed by a commodity. The raw materials necessary to maintain the Bitcoin network, including computing power and network bandwidth, could be put towards other uses but cannot be put towards simultaneous uses (even with multi-tasking, a computer can only work on one computation per unit of time per processor or core).

The Future of Killbots

For those of you who thought I was joking about killbots I have bad news: I wasn’t joking about killbots. The state has been looking into killbots for some time and its search is starting to become serious:

A robot, equipped with an M240 machine gun, moves through the darkness until it stops under a stand of trees 100 yards from its squad of U.S. troops. The robot uses thermal imaging to detect enemy combatants hiding up ahead and aims its gun at them.

With a single command from its human controller, who is with the squad 100 yards back, the robot opens fire and takes out the enemy, saving the troops from a potentially deadly attack.

Eventually our government will decided that having humans withing 100 yards of the killbots is a liability and will attempt to move them back. Terrestrial drones require more immediate decision making than their aerial brethren so having pilots in Colorado won’t work. That means controllers will have to be near the battlefield and, eventually, the enemies of America will learn to strike those areas instead of fighting our terrestrial drones. After that happens our government will decide that having soldiers on the battlefield is dangerous regardless of proximity. When that decision has been made the terrestrial drones will be made autonomous and we’ll finally have fully automated warfare. Best of all, any innocent people who are killed by our autonomous killing machines can be written off as a software glitch.

The future is both amazing and frightening at the same time.