Deanna Hoak » SFnal

Synthetic Telepathy

Deanna Hoak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:18:09 +0000

MSNBC had a fascinating article today on a form of synthetic telepathy being developed by the US Army, to be used for creating voice mail and email:

To those who might be nervous about thought-based communication turning into a sci-fi comedy of errors, D’Zmura says not to worry. Mind-message composition would take specific conscious thoughts and training to develop them. The device would also have a on/off switch.

“When I was a kid I occasionally said things that were inappropriate, and I learned not to do that,” said D’Zmura. “I think that people would learn to think in a way the computer couldn’t interpret. Or they can just switch it off.”

The notion of learning to hide your off-topic thoughts from such a device, and how that might be accomplished, is interesting.

SF quote of the day

Deanna Hoak — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:11:12 +0000

“But science fiction eventually becomes true, doesn’t it?”

Rhetorical question by Dr. Steven Wolf of Brooke Army Medical Center, in this story on attempting to regrow human limbs.

Would love to hear this group’s thoughts. :-)

Science songs

Deanna Hoak — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:02:04 +0000

CNN ran a story today on a Boston University professor who composes science songs, and they showed a short clip of him singing one about a black hole.

I of course had to search out the archive of all his songs.

They’re fun and made me laugh a lot. :-) “Bad Data” particularly cracked me up, though the clips his colleagues took of him surreptitiously performing “Superliminal Lover” are also not to be missed.

Bionic Eyes

Deanna Hoak — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:54:39 +0000

I’ve commented on bionic eye technology before, but it looks like they’re improving it. At this point they’re having success implanting an artificial retina and linking it to an external transmitter and video camera that can transmit light and motion to the optic nerve; they’re trying to put together one with enough sensors to enable facial recognition and are hoping to develop a pea-sized camera that can be implanted within a blind eye. Really interesting stuff.

When the Earth will end

Deanna Hoak — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:15:57 +0000

Here’s a cool SFnal story (although it’s on Fox :-P): Scientists have predicted when the Earth will end.

The article includes the proposal that we can save ourselves by taming an asteroid to swing by the Earth every few thousand years, pushing us into a higher solar orbit. Nifty notion. :)

Robotic exoskeletons

Deanna Hoak — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:20:11 +0000

I had read about these exoskeletons before, but I hadn’t seen a video of them in action and assumed they were much more unwieldy than they look here. I’ve read so many novels where such armor was imagined. Amazing.

Air guitar shirt

Deanna Hoak — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 16:33:17 +0000

I’m astounded at the things being developed these days. Here’s a nifty one: a T-shirt that senses your air guitar strumming and turns it into music.

On the copyediting front, for those LJ users who might have missed it over the weekend, you might be interested in checking out my post “Copyediting, Illustrated.” It was a damn lot of work, so I’m hoping it’s useful. :-)

Red Spot Jr. is changing

Deanna Hoak — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:12:24 +0000

Jupiter’s Oval BA storm (the Red Spot Jr.) is getting stronger and redder.

The Great Red Spot has always fascinated me. It’s amazing to think of a storm three times the size of Earth. It’ll be interesting to see what its little brother–which is “only” the size of our planet–is up to in the coming years.

Advances in teleportation

Deanna Hoak — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:18:48 +0000

This article notes that physicists in Denmark have succeeded in teleporting “a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms” a distance of half a meter. I wish the article went into a bit more detail, but it is very interesting nonetheless.

Too freaking cool

Deanna Hoak — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 23:12:00 +0000

What I love the most about really good science fiction ideas is knowing that they could become reality.

Superhuman senses through your tongue. How cool can you get?