LISTEN To This Issue.

Quote of the Week.

The Impossible -- Isn't.

Storage Update.

The Long Arm Of -- The Doctor!

Computing And -- Life...

From Out of the Ether...

Worth Its Weight In Gold?

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us?  If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, Web-based, MP3 version. 

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So, if you wish, just click on the following link to listen to this issue!  http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com/articles/20011008/20011008.mp3 .

Quote of the Week.

 

Food for thought:

"Could a person, years ago, contemplating the first Model T rolling off the line, have forecast the extensive paved road system, the Interstate highway system? Maybe.

What about drive-through banking or Holiday Inns? Again, maybe.

What about McDonalds on practically every street-corner? Probably not.

Historically, this took around 50-70 years to unfold. [But] in the computer age, we're seeing developments like this every 18 months to 2 years!"

Professor Joe Werner
Computer Information Systems Program,
Lansing Community College

What "improbables" do YOU expect to see two to three years from now...?

 

The Impossible -- Isn't.

 

The Past.

In mid-1997, Nicholas Negroponte, the head of MIT's Media Lab, stated his (some felt outrageous) belief that while it would take some time to arrive, "teleportation" was going to be in our future. (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/19990719.html#When_Worlds) 

But before that year was out, to the surprise of many, we were treated to the startling revelation that that teleportation was in fact no longer science fiction at all! (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/971222.html#A_Whole_New_Window)   Of course, the airlines were in no danger from this advance, because the only thing that had been teleported across distance was the polarization of one photon -- an ethereal thing at best.  Yet it was an amazing beginning, clearly portending things yet to come...

And come they did, as is so often the case when scientists worry the proverbial bone.  By the next year, Cal Tech professor Tony Friede demonstrated the next step, teleporting the information from not just one, but from many photons, across distance in no time at all (http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc/981102.html#Beam_Me_Up_Scotty). 

Very interesting, and potentially very useful -- but still just the teleportation of "information" (the state of photons of light.)

 

Today.

But science marches on, as just demonstrated by Eugene Polzik and others at Denmak's University of Aarhus.  Brought to our attention by reader Ken LaCrosse, they have now "...induced two samples of several trillion atoms to influence each other from a distance, using the phenomenon of quantum entanglement," according to the Oct. 1 Edupage.

The Sept. 27 issue of Nature puts it this way,

"For the first time, physicists have forged quantum entanglement between two large blobs of gas. The achievement brings closer the possibility of super-fast quantum computers and teleportation."

Note that this isn't a sensational headline in a tabloid, but it's a passage in a respected scientific journal! (http://www.nature.com/nsu/010927/010927-11.html)

What they've done, basically, is to raise the number of atoms whose "state" has been "teleported" -- communicated instantaneously across distance -- from the previous high of four atoms, to "a million million caesium atoms."  According to Ignacio Cirac, a physicist at the University of Innsbruck, "This should pave the way for a new generation of experiments to teleport states of matter."

Impressive.  Although Scotty does still (so far) reign supreme when it comes to sending people from here to there in the blink of an eye.  Because according to Nature,

"Teleportation will not involve the wholesale deconstruction and reconstruction of humans, Star Trek-style. It should allow the arrangement of one set of quantum particles to reproduce more or less instantly that of a similar collection of distant particles. In this way a message encoded in photons of light could be transmitted from one place to another without sending the photons across the intervening space."

[Off the subject, while speaking of Star Trek, I just saw my first episode of "Enterprise," the prequel to the original Star Trek TV series.  Sad to say, to paraphrase a political quote, "This is no Star Trek..."]

 

Tomorrow...?

Like "Enterprise," this latest experiment in teleportation may be no Star Trek, but it is still nothing to sneer at.  Consider -- do you recall pre-fiber optic international phone conversation, when the 46,000 mile trip to the satellite and back introduced a delay that caused you and the person on the other end to constantly interrupt each other?  (You may have seen this more recently on CNN, whose reporters in remote areas use suitcase-sized satellite terminals to provide live discussions with the anchor people half a world away.)  Wouldn't it be useful if that video feed (or any other type of data) could be sent instantaneously -- with NO delay! 

Or how about a no-delay data link for controlling spacecraft, where conventional delay today isn't in the half-second range, but is measured in minutes or hours or longer, making real-time mission control impossible.  Similarly, this technology might grow into no-delay communications links to colonies on the Moon, or on Mars, helping pioneers to feel a bit more at home.  Or, what materials can shield such teleportation of information -- if the effect is distance-insensitive, and if a thousand feet of water are like so much air to this effect, could submarines suddenly have high-bandwidth communications while submerged?  And remember, these are just the tips of the iceberg of what this new effect might yield as scientists learn more about "teleportation."  (Additional details on this experiment are at http://www.dfi.aau.dk/amo/qoptics/qa.htm .)

The end of this teleportation road is not yet in sight, and it's certainly not yet clear that Star Trek's transporter will ever actually "beam me up."  But considering that during four short years we've gone from science fiction to communicating the information of a trillion atoms across distance in zero time, this is a very good reminder that "the impossible" -- often isn't. 

Arthur C. Clarke put it so well (I paraphrase):

"When a scientist states that something is possible, he's usually right.  But when a scientist tells us that something is impossible, he's very probably wrong."

As Mr. Spock has been known to say:

"Fascinating."

 

Storage Update.

 

I just checked the lowest priced PCs offered by several manufacturers, and the smallest hard disk drive was 20 gigabytes.  A "mere" 20 gigabytes might not seem too impressive these days, when a higher-end $1,500 PC can easily come with a 40 or 80 gigabyte drive, but a little "perspective" puts this in its place:  these low-end 20,000 megabyte (20 gigabyte) drives are 1,000 times larger, and 14 times LESS expensive, than the 20 megabyte drive I bought for my first Macintosh seventeen years ago!  Not a bad price/performance improvement, considering that based on these two drives, the price per megabyte dropped from $60, to half-a-penny, during those 17 years. 

But it may not be too long before today's higher-end 80 and 100 gigabyte drives become the "low end."  Consider that Maxtor has just announced a 160 gigabyte version of their D540X hard drive, fitting in the same small physical size as its predecessor -- at a price of but $400! 
(http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=
MXO&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=205945 and http://www.maxtor.com/products/DiamondMax/DiamondMax/
DataSheet/D540X133_datasheet.pdf) 

Which means that as these drives hit the market, the price for this respectable fraction of a terabyte of storage will have dropped again -- to but one-quarter-of-one-penny, per megabyte.  

Our ability to capture and record an almost inconceivable amount of information is becoming very affordable.  What groundbreaking new applications do you foresee from such vast and inexpensive storage?

   

Your Feedback is Important!

 

I'd like to understand your interest in The Harrow Technology Report, how you make use of it, and the value you feel it provides to you, your career, and to your company.

Please send your comments to me at  Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com  .

I look forward to hearing from you!

Jeff Harrow

 

The Long Arm Of -- The Doctor!

 

The Situation:

A 68-year old woman is lying on a table in Strasbourg, France, and needs her gallbladder removed.  But the best surgeon for the job is four-thousand miles to the west in New York.  What to do?

 

Previously:

Previously, on "As Our Technological World Turns," doctor or patient would have had to make the long trip.  But in this case, brought to our attention by reader David Taylor from the Sept. 26 Computerworld (http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO64256,00.html), the doctor reached out and touched his patient without anyone getting on a plane.  Forty-five minutes later, the gall bladder was history, and the doctor moved on to his next patient a continent away.

This is an early example of how surgical robots, which already allow a doctor to sit in the same room as her patient and perform "assisted, minimally-invasive surgery" (the doctor's hand movements are scaled down to allow her to operate using thin robotic arms that enter through three tiny incisions), are extending their reach through telecommunications to perform surgery at a distance.  (The military is a particularly interested party to this research, foreseeing that such devices will extend the best possible care to field hospitals near a battlefield.)

 

The Problem, And The Solution:

It follows that once these robots had the doctor and the patient separated across the operating room, it wasn't too difficult a conceptual leap to separate them by cities, or even oceans.  But a stumbling block to this remote surgery has been that nasty old speed-of-light delay. 

With traditional communications channels, the delay between when the doctor makes a movement, and when she sees the round-trip result, would be about a second -- far too long to make either doctor or patient very comfortable.  But in this case, the data was sent over a dedicated, low-latency, 10 megabits/second fiber link supplied by France Telecom, which reduced the delay to an acceptable (almost imperceptible) .15 seconds. 

 

Tomorrow?

As doctors, patients, and insurance companies get more comfortable with this setup, and as dedicated fiber links continue their spider web growth (France Telecom already has such connections between hundreds of cities in up to 50 countries), I expect that we'll be seeing far more opportunities for getting the best surgeon to each job without the enormous waste of time and money (and discomfort for the patient) of traveling.

This may not be (and had best not turn into) "desktop surgery," but it is a great example of how innovative minds continue to extend the capabilities of the communications and computing infrastructures that we take for granted. 

I, for one, can't wait to see what comes next!

 

Computing And -- Life...

 

The Business Of Life -- Incredible changes are in the offing, as offshoots of the technologies that enable Moore's Law to double computing power every 18 months enables scientists to explore previously uncharted terrain in biology and other life sciences.  For example, brought to our attention by reader Kenneth LaCrosse, consider that semiconductor manufacturing techniques are now being used to produce a bio-compatible scaffold that encourages stem cells to form new bone, which can then be used in place of painful and somewhat dangerous bone grafts!  (http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=2266)  Or consider that increasingly, potential drugs are being initially screened for value and safety through data crunching, rather than animal crunching.

This potential for "computing" to continue to drive life sciences in fascinating directions is not lost on companies like IBM -- they expect to sell $7 billion of computing to life sciences customers within three years (out of a total life sciences computing market of $40 billion), according to the Sept. 25 News.com (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7297650.html?tag=dd.ne.dht.nl-hed.0 ). 

Which is a good reminder that even as PC sales are slowing, the demand for "computing" will become ever-more important as new fields continue to delve further into areas that "naked humans" can't explore. 

Computing and its many offshoots represent the test tubes and Bunsen burners of these laboratories of the future.  And they are going to lead us in some truly extraordinary directions!

   

From Out of the Ether...

 

·        There Are Bugs, And Then There Are BUGS! -- Commenting on our recent insight into the shotgun wedding between silicon chips and snail neurons (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20010910/20010910.htm#gray), reader Jeff Birkel offers us a somewhat chilling thought as to one possible result of the thinning line between things that are living, and things that are not:

"This reminded me of a show on PBS that I saw a few years ago about "the Flu" viruses that periodically invade the US.  Researchers at the CDC are able to track the movement of viruses like the Hong Kong flu, tracing them back to their point of origin.  Apparently in some parts of the world, farms are laid out in such a way that the chicken coop is right next to the pigpen, and the pigpen is right next to the farmer's house.  These people live almost literally with their animals, and this close proximity of chickens and pigs and humans provides an environment in which a virus can make the leap across species.  The virus then devastates human populations because human immune systems have never seen it before.

Imagine if a snail virus managed to jump to the neighboring silicon. Far-fetched perhaps, but I can also remember reading about the similarity between carbon and silicon atoms, and the possibilities for silicon-based life forms.  A nightmare scenario would have some neural computing researcher creating a virus that learned to literally infect a silicon based device, and then run unchecked through the defenseless silicon chip "population".

Probably not.  But hey, as computing devices become more like life forms, why wouldn't they start to have medical problems?"

Yes, this does read like science fiction, right now.  But such things are worth thinking about so that we do consider such "improbables," as we seriously "change the rules."

And, I can just see it now -- HMOs for PDAs?

·        And Speaking Of Bugs -- It turns out that real bugs, specifically the fungi that we recently learned can destroy CDs, are quite happy to go after just about any computer storage media if the conditions are right (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20010924/20010924.htm#_Toc525627016).  Reader Clark Mahan describes what he experienced first-hand while working at a school for the children of missionaries, deep in the heart of the jungle in southern Venezuela: 

"The weather there varied form hot to very hot (95F to 110F), and the humidity varied from damp to wet (95% RH and up).  We had to store CD’s, videotapes, and floppy disks in a “hot box” (any cabinet with a light bulb on) all of the time to discourage fungus growth, which would render the recording unusable!

Sometimes we could polish damaged CD’s with fiberglass cleaner, or run the video tapes thru a tape cleaner and restore them to use, but the floppies were always ruined.

There was even an instance where glass panels were stored stacked one against the other, and some fungus grew between them, etching the glass to a frosted appearance!

Talk to your favorite missionary...this is not unusual!"

Very serious little beasties.  And just because most of us don't live in the jungle, we really can't rest easy -- image how hot and humid it can get in non-climate controlled storage buildings, such as self-serve sheds and older warehouses.  In many places, summer humidity can be distressingly high -- perhaps high enough to invite the fungi to have a data feast, on our data!  We have been warned...

Worth Its Weight In Gold?

 

Finally, for many years, that phrase has been used to describe something of great value.  But it was usually a euphemism -- the things we said were worth their weight in gold, usually weren't.  Now though, thanks to reader Bob Withers and the Aug. 24 InformationWeek.com (http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010824S0020), we find that today's commonplace electronics are, indeed, often worth their weight in that yellow metal!

For example, a Siemens SL45 cell phone/PDA/MP3 player weighs 88 grams and sells for about $740, or $8.40/gram.  Gold is currently valued $8.84/gram!

Or consider Flash memory cards:  A 128-megabyte Sony MagicGate Memory Stick weighs about 4 grams and sells for $169, or about $37/gram.  Memory Sticks are worth more than four-times their weight in gold!

And as our electronics get even smaller, lighter, and more compact, "gold" may turn out to be a poor cousin by comparison.

Hummm.  In the U.S., our paper currency was once called "gold certificates," and later "silver certificates." Might we one day be seeing -- "semiconductor certificates...?"

 

About "The Harrow Technology Report"