Tag: computers

CES 2004: A Gadget Odyssey

I’ve always been a gadget guy, so I would have been in heaven at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where gadgets from the way cool to the way weird were on display. Alas, I didn’t get to attend, but here are some of the highlights, gleaned from the extensive coverage atPCWorld.com. If …

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Cyberfarming

City dwellers tend to think of the high-tech revolution as primarily an urban phenomenon–hip office workers thumb-typing messages to each other on their pagers while standing in line for lattes, for example. But the countryside is well on its way to becoming as high-tech as the city, as new technologies relentlessly transform agriculture into something …

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SETI @ Home, revisited

Every day, I help search for extraterrestrial intelligence…or, at least, my computer does. It’s one of more than 4,287,000 computers worldwide called SETI@Home (SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which constantly examine data collected by the huge Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for signals that could have come from extraterrestrial civilizations. Any signals …

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Happy birthday, HAL

Last month a very important celebrity marked his birthday. He wasn’t an actor, though he was in a movie; he wasn’t an author, though he appeared in a book. And strangest of all, he died almost 30 years before he was born. He was HAL, the artificial intelligence that guided the spacecraft Discovery to its rendezvous with …

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Synthespians: artificial actors

In the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of the best performances is turned in by an actor who isn’t entirely real. Gollum, the hobbit-like creature who once possessed the One Ring and would do anything to possess it again is the latest and most-impressive-to-date example of a “synthespian”–a computer-generated actor. …

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Ratbots

  Picture this: there’s been an earthquake and you’re trapped in the rubble. In the dark you hear a scrabbling sound…and feel the long, naked tail of a rat slither across your cheek… Sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? But if recent research bears fruit, it may be a dream come true–because that rat could …

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E-books

Here’s a conversation starter for you. “So, do you think e-books will replace p-books?” Of course, you may have to first define your terms. An e-book is an “electronic book,” a book in a computer file format so it can be read on an electronic device, while a p-book is, of course, what you call …

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Telesurgery

It sounds like something out of science fiction: surgeons in North America removing the gall bladder of a 68-year-old woman in France using a remote-controlled robot. But that’s exactly what happened earlier this month, ushering in an exciting new era of telesurgery that holds promise of saving lives all over Earth–and even off of it. …

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Wireless wonders

Wireless telegraphy isn’t difficult to understand, Albert Einstein once said.  The regular telegraph is like a very long cat; you pull its tail in New York and it meows in Los Angeles.  Wireless telegraphy is just the same, only without the cat. That being the case, the world is filling with more and more non-existent …

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Smart fabric

A new technology developed by the Canadian Space Agency to help control the new robot arm on the International Space Station may soon be finding its way into your car, your couch, and even your clothes. It’s called smart fabric, because it turns fabric into a sensitive computer interface. The underlying technology, called Kinotex, was …

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Professor Cyborg

Have you ever felt like your computer knew what you wanted to accomplish—and was determined to stop you from doing so? Right now, that’s just anthropomorphic thinking—but in the not too distant future, a computer may know what you’re thinking. It might even be doing some thinking—or, at least, data processing—for you, without you having …

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Science gifts for Christmas: 1999

There’s been a lot of talk this year about how much easier the home computer has made Christmas shopping, and I agree–but not because I’m doing a lot of shopping on-line. I find computers have made Christmas shopping easier by opening up a whole new range of gift ideas. Any kid with a computer is …

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