loosy|goosy|ness - Blog

To use multicore processors effectively the technology industry needs to radically rethink the basic computer architecture it has used over the past 50 years, a University of Maryland researcher argues in the January edition of the Association for Computing Machinery's flagship Communications publication.

"The recent dramatic shift from single-processor computer systems to many-processor parallel ones requires reinventing much of computer science to build and program the new systems," argues Uzi Vishkin, a professor at the Un iversity of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, in the paper.

Vishkin even offers a new architecture abstraction, which he calls ICE (Immediate Concurrent Execution), and which he developed with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The basic computer architecture we use today is based on the concepts put forth by mathematician John von Neumann in the 1940s. In his architecture, data and programs are held in computer memory and fed to the computer's CPU. Programs are executed using a program counter, which supplies the CPU the address of the next instruction in memory to execute.

This approach allows what Vishkin calls serial computing, a design in which "any single instruction available for execution in a serial program executes immediately."

But it is limited because it allows only a single instruction to be executed at a time. In an age of multicore processors and large amounts of available memory, this limit is no longer necessary, Vishkin argues. Instead, multiple instructions can often be executed much faster in parallel -- all at the same time and in a single step.

Vishkin's alternative varies the von Neumann architecture by allowing an indefinite number of instructions to be executed at any given time, which could greatly simplify matters for programmers. With ICE, "You could dream up any number of instructions as long as the input for one is not the output for the another," he said. The programmer wouldn't have to worry about how many processors would be available for the task.

Such an architecture, Vishkin states, would require changes in hardware design. For the approach to operate, the chips would require a high-bandwidth, low-latency network between the processors and memory. The hardware would have a single processor core to control all the other cores. If the code is serial, it can be executed on that core. If there are additional instructions, the central processor can dole out additional instructions to the other cores.

Source: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/1/103225-using-simple-abstraction-to-reinvent-computing-for-parallelism/fulltext [via news.yahoo.com]

Physicists have cloaked a macroscopic object for the first time. And they've done it using conventional materials and techniques

There has been no shortage of column inches devoted to invisibility cloaks since engineers built the first one back in 2006. This was an impressive device but it had some important limitations, not least of which was that it worked only for a single frequency of microwaves.

One of the biggest questions that physicists have puzzled over since then is whether it is possible to build similar devices that work over the range of frequencies visible to the human eye. Last year, a couple of groups announced a solution to this problem in the form of 'carpet cloaks' that lie over an object, hiding its presence over a range of optical frequencies.

Again, these were impressive feats but with some limitations. These cloaks are made of finely carved silicon microstructures and so were expensive to build. And they can only hide objects up to a few micrometres in size, not much bigger than the wavelength of light itself.

Today, Baile Zhang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge at a couple of buddies have done significantly better. They've built a carpet cloak capable of hiding objects in the millimetre range over a broad range of visible frequencies from red to blue.

More impressive than this is that they've built this cloak out of calcite, an ordinary and relatively cheap optical material, using conventional optical lens fabrication techniques. This makes the cloak cheap and easy to build.

Carpet cloaks sit on a surface covering the object to be hidden. Their trick is to make it look as if light is reflecting off this surface, thereby hiding any object that they cover.

Until now, this has only been done using artificially modified structures that steers light in a specially engineered ways. This so-called metamaterial is a kind of wonder substance that is the focus of great attention right now.

However, Zhang and co realised that there are naturally occurring materials that can do the same thing. Calcite is one of them. It is unusual because its optical properties depend on the direction that light passes through it.

By carefully exploiting this property, they've been able to create a block of calcite (actually two blocks of calcite) that acts like a carpet cloak. They've even demonstrated it by hiding a wedge of steel 38mm long and 2 mm high. Zhang and co say that this is the first time that a visible object has ever been cloaked. That's impressive.

Their cloak has its limitations, of course. The main one is that it only works in a single 2D plane, so the object is hidden only to those looking from a certain direction.

Another is that it works only with polarised light. But that's not as limiting as it may seem at first sight. Water tends to polarise light so it seems reasonable to think that the cloak ought to work well underwater.

It wasn't so long ago that some physicists were saying that optical invisibility cloaks would always be impossible (because metamaterials tend to absorb visible light faster than they can transmit it).

That's turned out to be of little concern and invisibility cloaks just get better and better. In fact, it's hard to think of a technology that has advanced so far, so quickly.

Source: arxiv.org/abs/1012.2238: Macroscopic Invisible Cloak for Visible Light [via www.technologyreview.com]

Let's face it: The planet is heating up, Earth's population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.

So, according to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells Big Think. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."
Hawking says he is an optimist, but his outlook for the future of man's existence is fairly bleak. In the recent past, humankind's survival has been nothing short of "a question of touch and go" he says, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as just one example of how man has narrowly escaped extinction. According to the Federation of American Scientists there are still about 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons scattered around the planet, 7,770 of which are still operational. In light of the inability of nuclear states to commit to a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has not subsided.
In fact, "the frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future," says Hawking, "We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully."

Even if humans manage to avoid a nuclear stand-off over the next thousand years, our fate on this planet is still pretty much certain. University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith says eventually the aging Sun will accelerate global warming to a point where all of Earth's water will simply evaporate.
"Life on Earth will have disappeared long before 7.6 billion years," says Smith, "Scientists have shown that the Sun's slow expansion will cause the temperature at the surface of the Earth to rise. Oceans will evaporate, and the atmosphere will become laden with water vapor, which (like carbon dioxide) is a very effective greenhouse gas. Eventually, the oceans will boil dry and the water vapor will escape into space. In a billion years from now the Earth will be a very hot, dry and uninhabitable ball."
Finally, between the next thousand years or so that Hawking says it will take man to make the planet uninhabitable and the billion years it will take for the sun to turn our planet into an arid wasteland, there is always the chance that a nearby supernova, an asteroid, or a quick and painless black hole could do us in.

Takeaway
One way or another, the life on Earth will likely become uninhabitable for mankind in the future. We need to start seriously thinking about how we will free ourselves from the constraints of this dying planet.  

Why We Should Reject This Idea

Despite what Hawking describes as humankind's "selfish and aggressive instinct," there may be some biological impediments to finding another planet to inhabit.
"The nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away," says University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese, "That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there."
Unfortunately, at the moment we can only travel at about ten thousandth of light speed, which means if man were to use chemical fuel rockets similar to the those used during the Apollo mission to the moon, the journey would take about 50,000 years. Without the use of a science-fiction-like warp drive or cryogenic freezing technology, no human would live long enough to survive the journey. In addition, "the radiation you would encounter alone would kill you, even if you could get a rocket to go anywhere near that fast," says Freese.
On the upside, if man ever develops the technology to travel at the speed of light while remaining shielded from cosmic radiation, he could effectively travel into the future. "A five year trip at light speed could push an astronaut forward by 1000 earth years," says Freese, "If he wanted to see if any humans were still around by then."

More Resources:
— Stephen Hawking's homepage.
— Dr. Katherine Freese's homepage.

Source: http://bigthink.com

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We don't have too many cameras out there in space past the moon, which is why most of our space shots are either looking outward, such as the shots taken by Hubble, or taken of Earth from the moon or closer. Which is why this video is so astounding. It's a video of the moon passing directly in front of the Earth, taken by NASA's EPOXI spacecraft from a whopping 31 million miles away.

The quality isn't the best, but it doesn't need to be; it's still absolutely breathtaking. This is an alien's-eye view, my friends, seen for the very first time. Amazing.
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Source: Bad Astronomy via Neatorama

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Asteroid 2007 TU24, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 11, 2007 will closely approach the Earth to within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) on 2008 Jan. 29 08:33 UT. This object, between 150 and 600 meters in diameter, will reach an approximate apparent magnitude 10.3 on Jan. 29-30 before quickly becoming fainter as it moves further from Earth. For a brief time the asteroid will be observable in dark and clear skies with amateur telescopes of 3 inch apertures or larger.

For an interactive illustration of this object's orbit see:

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2007+TU24&orb=1

The illustration below is courtesy of amateur astronomer Dr. Dale Ireland from Silverdale, WA. The illustration shows the asteroid's track on the sky for 3 days near the time of the close Earth approach as seen from the city of Philadelphia. Since the object's parallax will be a significant fraction of a degree, observers are encouraged to use our on-line Horizons ephemeris generation service for their specific locations. These personalized ephemeris tables can be generated at: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi?find_body=1&body_group=sb&sstr=2007%20TU24

Given the estimated number of near-Earth asteroids of this size (about 7,000 discovered and undiscovered objects), an object of this size would be expected to pass this close to Earth, on average, about every 5 years or so. The average interval between actual Earth impacts for an object of this size would be about 37,000 years. For the January 29th encounter, near Earth asteroid 2007 TU24 has no chance of hitting, or affecting, Earth.

2007 TU24 will be the closest currently known approach by a potentially hazardous asteroid of this size or larger until 2027. Plans have been made for the Goldstone planetary radar to observe this object Jan 23-24 and for the Arecibo radar to observe it Jan 27-28 and then Feb 1-4. High resolution radar imaging is expected, which may permit later 3-D shape reconstruction.
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Source: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/

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Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes -- visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

Contact lenses with metal connectors for electronic circuits were safely worn by rabbits in lab tests.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising." The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz's now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW's electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center's ophthalmology department.

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

"People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it's safe," said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.

A researcher holds one of the completed lenses.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said.

Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces -- the same type of forces that make water move up a plant's roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward -- pull the pieces into position.

The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer's vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won't obstruct a person's view.

"There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation," Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.

A full-fledged display won't be available for a while, but a version that has a basic display with just a few pixels could be operational "fairly quickly," according to Parviz.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Technology Gap Innovation Fund from the University of Washington.
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Source: http://uwnews.washington.edu/

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

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According to Gates, there are currently six trends, which will be determining Microsoft and its product strategy for the years to come. In a rather unusual way, he mentioned the dramatic changes in the way the hardware engines that will be fueling new applications are engineered.

The fact that performance advances have shifted from a pure increase of clock speed to increased parallelism was described by Gates as a "challenge". He believes that "parallel execution will be the primary way silicon power will be delivered" down the road and not so much the fact that there is more clock speed available. According to Gates, microprocessors will get to 10 GHz, "but not much further" (...) "even 5 to 6 years out."
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Full Story: tgdaily.com

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Playing in two dimensions is easy enough, but what truly separates the men from the boys? Maybe it’s when you give up your easel for a tool belt and get to work with a hammer and chisel. These amazing sculptors took their talents 3-D.

1. Donatello (1386? - 1466)

David in bronze (Photo Credit: italiangerry [Flickr])	St. George (bronze copy of the marble original) (Photo Credit: Jastrow [wiki])

Unquestionably the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance, Donatello [wiki] was born in Florence, though he traveled widely and was famous throughout Italy. Donatello had complete mastery of bronze, stone, wood, and terra cotta, and nothing escaped his extraordinary capabilities: relief sculpture, nudes, equestrian statues, groups of figures, and single figures seated or standing. In fact, he reinvented the art of sculpture just as other contemporaries were reinventing the art of painting, and his innovations and discoveries were profoundly influential. Above all, Donatello seemed to be able to bring sculpture to life by his ability to tell a story, combine realism and powerful emotion, and create the impression that his figures were more than mere objects of beauty for passive contemplation, but creations filled with energy and thought, ready to spring into action.

2. Michelangelo (1475 - 1564)

Michelangelo’s David

Michelangelo’s Pietà

Clearly an outstanding genius, Michelangelo’s [wiki] influence dominated European art until Picasso changed the rules. A sculptor first, painter and architect second, Michelangelo was a workaholic - a melancholic, temperamental, and lonely figure. He had a profound belief in the human form (especially the male nude) as the ultimate expression of human spirituality, sensibility, and beauty. In fact, Michelangelo’s early work shows the human being as the measure of all things: idealized, muscular, confident, and quasi-divine. Gradually that image becomes more expressive, more human, less perfect, fallible, and flawed. He loved turning and twisting poses full of latent energy, and faces that expressed the full range of human emotion. Endlessly inventive, he never repeated a pose, although being a true Renaissance man, he was proud to borrow from Greek and Roman precedents.

3. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 - 1680)

Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne

Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina

Bernini’s David

Bernini [wiki] set sculpture free from its previous occupation with earthly gravity and intellectual emotion, allowing it to discover a new freedom that permitted it to move, soar, and have a visionary and theatrical quality. A child prodigy, Bernini had a sparkling personality and brilliant wit (he wrote comedies) - qualities that shine through his sculptures. He was also a true visionary technically, able to carve marble so as to make it seem to move or have the delicacy of the finest lace. At his best he blends sculpture, architecture, and painting into an extravagant theatrical ensemble, especially in his fountains, where the play of water and light over his larger-than-life human figures and animals creates a vision that is literally out of this world.

4. Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917)

Rodin’s The Thinker, original bronze cast at the Musée Rodin in Paris (Image credit: a.muse.d [Flickr])

Rodin’s Gates of Hell, at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Rodin’s The Walking Man (Photo credit: David. Monniaux [wiki])

Rodin [wiki] is the glorious, triumphant finale to the sculptural tradition that starts with Donatello. He is rightly spoken of in the same breath as Michelangelo, although they’re very different: Michelangelo carved into marble whereas Rodin molded with clay. A shy workaholic, untidy, and physically enormous, Rodin emerged from impoverished beginnings. He became an international celebrity and was deeply attractive to smart women. Rodin was also well known for loving the fluidity of clay and plaster, and was able to retain this quality even when his work was cast in bronze, thereby magically releasing in his figures an extraordinary range of human feelings and a sense of the unknown forces of nature.

5. Constantin Brancusi (1876 - 1957)

Brancusi’s The Kiss

Brancusi’s The Endless Column

Brancusi [wiki] is one of the seminal figures of 20th-century art with a profound influence on sculpture and design. Born into a Romanian peasant family, he settled in Paris in 1904, becoming a student of Rodin. Amazingly, Brancusi remained indifferent to honor and fame. At the heart of his work is a tireless refinement and search for purity. Never abstract, his work always references something recognizable in nature. Brancusi believed in the maxim "Truth to materials," and he always brought out the inherent quality of each material that he used. The purity and simplicity of his form touch something very basic in the human psyche, just as does, for example, the sound of the waves of the sea.
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Source: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/15/5-greatest-sculptors-of-all-time

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Die mit vielen Vorschusslorbeeren bedachten "serviceorientierten Architekturen", die in der IT eine neue Managementstruktur widerspiegeln sollen, funktionieren oft nicht, ergab eine Untersuchung der britischen Marktforscher.

Zwar werden service-orientierte Architekturen (SOA) in den nächsten fünf Jahren massiv verändern, wie IT-Abteilung und Unternehmen zusammenarbeiten, stellt die Butler Group in ihrer neuen Studie "Planning and Implementing SOA" fest. Doch die wenigen Unternehmen, die bereits Tests mit der SOA durchführten, neigten dazu, erst die internen Geschäftsprozesse umzugestalten und dann erst die IT in den betroffenen Bereichen anzupassen.

Mike Thompson, Co-Autor der Studie: "Viele konzentrieren sich auf die Technik, die direkt mit einer SOA verbunden ist, aber beschäftigen sich nicht mit der, die die Geschäftsprozesse steuern soll". Ein Mangel an Expertise im eigenen Haus und ungenügender Festlegung, wer wie mitreden will, führe zu Problemen beim Datenmanagement, der Performance, Sicherheit und der Dienste-Verfügbarkeit.

Nur etwa 8 Prozent der befragten 80 IT-Manager größerer Unternehmen hat bereits eine SOA installiert, 17 Prozent beschäftigten sich mit Versuchen, und 36 Prozent überprüften noch, ob SOA überhaupt in Frage kommt.

Fazit der Studie ist, nicht gleich alles umzukrempeln, sondern mit einem konkreten Geschäftsproblem zu beginnen, daraus zu lernen und anhand dieser Erfahrungen vom Kleinen zum Großen zu gelangen. Das Inhaltsvezeichnis der Studie mit wertvollen Tipps für Unternehmen, die SOA einführen wollen, stellt Butler als PDF online. Die komplette Studie ist kostenpflichtig erhältlich.

Rob Levy, Cheftechniker beim Unternehmens-Software-Anbieter BEA Systems, bekräftigt diese Erfahrungen gegenüber VNU: "Das A in SOA sollte man nicht als 'Architecture', sondern als 'Attitude' sehen." Nicht umsonst ist der Amerikaner darauf versessen, nutzerfreundliche Web-2.0-Techniken in seine Infrastrukturlösungen zu integrieren, die hinter der SOA stehen. Levy: "Auch Firmen werden künftig mehr von unten gesteuert und nicht mehr nur von einem Ober-Zampano, der allen anderen erklärt, wie sie zu arbeiten haben". Entsprechend solle auch an die Implementierung von SOA-Software herangegangen werden.
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Quelle: http://www.testticker.de/news/professional_computing/news20070110011.aspx

Moving with the stealth and style of a startup, mighty Microsoft Corp. today has released a point-and-click software tool designed to make it easier to program simple robots.

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REDMOND, Wash. — Dec. 12, 2006 — Among the many remarkable innovations emerging out of the robotics industry, from surveillance robots that can defuse roadside bombs to robotic arms that perform surgeries, one persistent challenge has been the lack of a common development platform that would allow developers to easily create robotic applications for varied hardware platforms. Today, Microsoft Corp. is closing this gap with the release of Microsoft^® Robotics Studio, a new Windows^®-based development environment for creating robotic software for a wide variety of hardware platforms. Microsoft also introduced a new third-party partner program featuring Microsoft Robotics Studio-enabled applications, services and robots from independent software vendors, service providers, hardware component vendors and robot manufacturers. Already more than 30 third-party companies have pledged support for the new robotics development and runtime platform, which is available for download and evaluation at http://microsoft.com/robotics.
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Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/dec06/12-12MSRoboticsStudioAvailablePR.mspx