It’s a pity that intelligence and education isn’t a barrier to reproduction. I think some people are definitely holding this evolution business back…

Religious ’shun nanotechnology’

Are they really that concerned about the

potential to create life at a nano scale without divine intervention

Maybe they are worried about the competition and that some creatures will be worshipping the Great Creator Craig Venter in a few million years.

A few months ago I found an interesting site called Machines Like Us. It covers a whole range of subjects that I’m interested in – Atheism, Science, Technology, Robotics and Artificial Life/Artificial Intelligence. It looks like they have now started to keep the site up to date, so I’m going to keep a closer eye on it.

By the way, still no news on this front…

I haven’t been blogging for the last few weeks as my spare time (normally late at night) has been taken up with experimenting with MythTV. MythTV is a really neat collection of programs for turning a Linux computer into personal video recorder (PDR).

I’ve been playing around with Linux for a year or so, but I haven’t found anything in particular that I could really test my Linux system with. About a month ago I saw a Linux magazine that featured Mythbuntu. This is a special release of Ubuntu with all the MythTV software bundled in. After reading the magazine, I thought I’d give it a go.

I installed the most recent release of Ubuntu 8.10, installed the MythTV software and bought a cheap Hauppage WinTV tuner card from EBay. As I have found with all things Linux, nothing is easy. I followed the helpful guide here to get going, but there are lots of annoying little details that need to be sorted out that you don’t get told about. E.g. changing ownership of files and sorting out video card settings.

I have just about got it working the way I want to. I can schedule recordings and watch them back, watch (and pause) live TV and watch pre-recorded videos (with added IMDB meta data). There are a couple of things that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

• Automatically stripping adverts from a recorded TV show
• Transcoding the standard MPEG2 format into DIVX (The standard format takes about 2GB an hour)
• Playing back through the TV

The first two of these are reasonably standard features, I just need to spend a little more time fiddling around. The third one is proving more difficult. I running Ubuntu on my old Toshiba laptop. My thinking was that, once I had recorded programs, I could take the laptop away and watch the programs at my convenience. Also, it makes it easier if I need to use a keyboard to enter data. The problem is that the laptop has a Trident Cyberblade video card and, as far as I can tell, Ubuntu only has decent support for nVidia and ATI video cards. There doesn’t appear to be any way to get an output from my s-video output. I have found that I can get a VGA output working, so there may be a workaround with this bit of kit. I don’t give up easily!

If I get all this working, the next thing will be to connect up a remote control and connect up my regular media player (previously my best ever gadget buy) to the MythTV setup as external storage for my movies.

As I normally do, I’ll spend weeks of late nights playing around with some new gadget, then lose interest for a while. I think I’ll keep at this one for a while though. We’ll see…

I’m normally a fan of the BBC, particularly the News website. However, even they let through some sloppy journalism sometimes. There was health story earlier this week about a man in a coma who apparently experienced a miraculous recovery due to some unusual treatment. My radar is well tuned to quackery and poor science, so I took a look.

Magnetic field ‘aids coma victim’

Generally, any treatment or intervention that seems to be too good to be true, is just that. Maybe this treatment works, maybe it doesn’t. However, this appears to be an unconventional treatment applied to just one person. This is not how a scientific trial of a treatment should work. Reporting on a single case like this is bad enough. What made it worse was that the BBC pulled out a quote from another scientist, Dr John Whyte of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and stuck that prominently on the article:

I believe that electromagnetic treatments such as deep brain stimulation, direct current transcranial stimulation, and TMS may all have therapeutic promise

This seems to be an endorsement of the treatment. However, when you read the full article, this quote is topped and tailed by the following quotes:

even eight months after a brain injury, spontaneous improvement of this type was “not uncommon”.

and

single cases provide very weak evidence except when treatment occurs very late (so spontaneous recovery should be minimal) and the patient is studied for a considerable interval both before and after the treatment.

This is quite a different view and is the reasonable response I would expect from a scientist. Maybe I’m being harsh on the person who wrote the article as they probably wouldn’t be responsible for the headline and the quote extraction.

I posted yesterday about the Artificial Life conference in the UK this week and I was surprised about how little the subject seems to have moved on since I was involved a decade ago. One of the things I did back then was to interview a futurologist at BT, Chris Winter. Chris had a tank full of ants in his office and he told me how he was studying them so he could use the ants’ method of simple individuals following a small number of simple rules to produce a complex, self-regulatory, self-repairing network.

BBC’s second ALife story in two days talks about the same ideas from BT and they don’t seem to have got much further either…

My news aggregator picked up this story today. It’s all about the efforts of a German university to use Artificial Life techniques to evolve realistic animal and human motion. The basic idea is that you build a model that has the same constraints as a real system, then genetic algorithms and neural networks to get your model come up with the best solution to the goal that you have set. It looks quite nice, but it doesn’t seem to have moved on a great deal since the work of Karl Sims that I first encountered a decade ago. This was back in the good old days when I was involved with Artificial Life as part of my job.

The  reason that the BBC picked up the story is because ALife XI is taking part in Winchester this week. I attended Alife V in Los Angeles a few years back and it was great fun. It was such a contrast to the normal academic conferences that I was used to. As well as the engineers and scientists there were also biologists, film makers and performance artists. Watching how the evolution of biological systems or whole ecosystems could be modelled and powerful and efficient the evolutionary process could be was fascinating.

Perhaps the brainwashed closed-minded students that Richard Dawkins had to deal with in his latest TV program would benefit from seeing how exciting and interesting ALife and evolution can be.

This evening I listened to the latest Guardian Science podcast that contained an interview with Piers Bizony. He was promoting his book How to Build Your Own Spaceship. I haven’t seen the book yet, but everything he said in the interview seemed very similar to the work and the opinions of David Ashford of Bristol Spaceplanes. David came to talk to a few of us at work a few years back and gave me a copy of his spaceplanes book. My naive question to him was “If this is such a good idea, why haven’t NASA been working on it?”. His answer seems to be the same as Piers Bizony. Back in the days of the USA/USSR space race, there was a lot of pressure to get something up in space quickly, so not much time and money was spent on development. The result was that large industries were then built on the old-fashioned rocket technology that came out of this race. The story from Ashford and Bizony regarding why there are no spaceplanes yet is partly the practicalities of an entrenched industry and partly suggestions of a conspiracy theory that I don’t think helps their ideas gain credibility.

The claim of people in the spaceplane business (what there is of it) is that, if they had just a tiny fraction of one percent of NASA’s budget, they could build a working spaceplane. I’d like to see them get a fair crack to try out their ideas. If there is going to be a spaceplane business in the future, Bristol seems like a good place to have it!

Edit: I found David Ashford’s book at work. It’s called ‘Spaceflight Revolution‘ and it was published by Imperial College Press in 2003.

Well, I’ve signed myself up for Twitter (http://twitter.com/sdhancock), but I haven’t quite worked out the point of it yet. Maybe if I had more friends…

or, to be specific, if more of my friends were geeks like me