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Una compañía sueca, Cypak, para montar un pequeño microprocesador en una hoja de papel, así como para imprimir sensores, interruptores y antenas de corto alcance:

The company, Cypak, has technology to mount a very small microprocessor, which it created, on paper (or inside a credit card), as well as a technique to print sensors, switches, and very short-range antennae on the same paper, using special conductive inks.

Drug trials need data about how and when subjects consume the drugs being tested. In this application, a pill pack registers when individual pills are popped out of their plastic bubbles; it then can beep and ask the user a question like, «Are you feeling better today? Press Yes or No.» (The answer buttons are on the pack itself.) When the patient visits the doctor, the package is placed on a Cypak reader and the data is downloaded to the physician’s computer.

Certus, a drug-testing company, has just begun testing Cypak’s technology. Compared with logging and «compliance» products that use more traditional computer parts and sensors, the Cypak technology is less expensive. The chips embedded in the paper drug packages cost only a buck or two, and the scanners that read the data from the used packages are inexpensive as well — less than $10, Cypak CEO Jakob Ehrensvärd says. Also, the data is more reliable than the logs that patients might keep.

(vía Smart Mobs)
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En Columbia, and the Dreams of Science Fiction Gary Westfahl argumenta que sí:

We must conquer space because science fiction has told us to.

We must conquer space because that is the way science fiction said it was going to be. After beginning with small steps into Earth orbit, we must build space stations, travel to the Moon, Mars, and other nearby planets, and set up human colonies wherever we go ? a process that science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s thought we would complete well before the year 2001. Then, we must ready ourselves for ventures into interstellar space, encounters with alien life, and the formation of a galaxy-spanning Federation of Planets. We must conquer space so that our children can be Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and so that our great-grandchildren can be Captain Kirk.

This is the dream that the people at NASA grew up with, the dream that has driven them and their supporters to keep plugging away at the conquest of space, in spite of mounting and persuasive evidence indicating that this quite possibly doesn’t really represent the very best use of their time and resources. This is the dream that will soon push our aging shuttle fleet back into orbit, fitted up with thousands of modifications and quick fixes, and this is the dream that will lead NASA to finance the construction of new alternatives to the shuttle, all bringing with them their own huge sets of impossible new technological challenges.

You’ve got to admire the astounding power of a form of literature that can keep inspiring people to do silly things.

But you’ve also got to wonder, especially on the days when those things go horribly wrong, whether this is necessarily an admirable quality.

Algo de razón tiene al afirmar que la ciencia ficción (aunque más bien la filmica y la televisiva, muy por delante de la escrita) ha modelado nuestra percepción de cómo debe ser el futuro humano en el espacio. Ciertamente, ¿a quién no le gustaría ser el capitán Kirk? ¿O uno de los comerciantes de Asimov?

Este ensayo se ha publicado en Locus y ha recibido las respuestas que cabía esperar. Por otra parte, el editor lo defiende argumentando que una literatura como la ciencia ficción debería cuestionarse todas las suposiciones.

A day at the office in 2013. Dan Farber cuenta la historia de Gregor Samson y la oficina en la que es posible que a todos nos toque vivir:

On this day, at 8:30 am, Gregor Samson will receive his first «referral,» an auto-generated, monthly employee report from the CSI. The report informs him that in the last 30 days he has spent 6 percent of his time browsing non-authorized Web locations, 23 percent in video conferences, 1.33 percent in the 4th floor lavatory, and 6 percent at the nearby Starbucks coincident with another 8x employee. He is also made aware that he is over budget in his application usage, which is metered by the minute.

In addition, Gregor is reminded that the corporate spamination system has groomed 42.3 GB of spam from his inbox but that 23 messages are still in an auto-deletion holding pattern pending his review. He also broke security policy by taking 11 classified documents, each with its own unique object tag, from his office to his home. All of this information is communicated to Gregor’s manager.

(vía Smart Mobs)
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Aquí mismo.

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Malditos pinguinos bárbaros 🙂

(vía Boing Boing)

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Un comentario sobre el nuevo Nokia 3650 en InfoWorld. Parece que les ha gustado el teléfono:

We pored over the 3650’s technical documentation for weeks before we received the phone, which is a prototype distributed to developers. The more we read, the more we thought, ?This isn’t a phone.? Quite right; voice calls are almost tangential to its design, although with a speakerphone, voice dialing, and a backlit keypad, it does voice as well as any mobile phone we’ve used. The 3650 is clearly a networked pocket computer, a portable mesh node, a reference platform for developers. This device, and the ones that will branch out from its design, are also remarkable business machines.

Looking at the preview of the 3650 and Nokia’s rapidly evolving tools and documentation, it’s impossible to rank Nokia’s approach against chief mobile platform rivals RIM, Palm, and Microsoft. It is clear that Nokia has the engineering skill to squeeze an incredible set of capabilities into a small device, and that Nokia is committed to supplying developers with the tools they need to target the Series 60 platform. If the broader U.S. consumer market doesn’t snatch up this phone (or one like it in a more businesslike form factor), businesses certainly will.

Que yo sepa, todavía no hay fecha de salida.

(vía Russell Beattie Notebook)

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Siempre que sea para usos no comerciales. Para bajárselo, aquí. Yo lo he hecho, lo he instalado, y no me he sentido nada impresionado. Eso después de años de usar productos Borland.

(vía Ed Tech Dev)

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José Luis Calvo estima los riesgos de volar en un transbordador y llega a la siguiente conclusión:

Por las razones que sean (mala construcción, desgaste excesivo…) los transbordadores son muy inseguros y esa inseguridad se traduce en muertos. Así las cosas, si la tecnología actual es incapaz de ofrecer respuestas a los requerimientos de un transbordador, este programa debe ser abandonado. La Ciencia no puede avanzar a cualquier precio y éste está resultando excesivo.

En unos comentarios a la nueva bitácora El ojo de buey me encuentro con una frase de Stuart Mill: «Prefiero un hombre triste a un cerdo feliz». Al leerla, les cuento, se me han puesto los pelos como escarpias, y me queda claro que Stuart Mill no tuvo que tratar con muchos amigos clínicamente deprimidos. Yo me quedo con el cerdo feliz sin dudarlo.

Buscando por ahí, parece que lo que realmente dijo fue: «Prefiero ser un hombre desdichado a un cerdo feliz». Me quedo igual. Puestos a elegir, prefiero ser un hombre feliz, pero en caso contrario, me sigo quedando con el cerdo.

¿Me estará entrando un ataque de antiintelectualismo?

Russell Beattie hace un curioso comentario sobre las diferencias en el uso del móvil entre Estados Unidos y Europa:

You can’t imagine it and will think I’m exaggerating, but EVERY SINGLE PERSON OVER THE AGE OF 13 has a mobile phone here, and most of those younger have them too. EVERY ONE. Teens specifically are not people with a lot of extra money, either to buy the phone or pay for minutes. Nor do they have bank accounts or credit. It’s all cheap pre-pay phones for them, and that’s fine with the telecoms.

There were 30 BILLION SMS messages sent last MONTH here in Europe. That’s over 100 messages per man, woman and child in Western Europe. Those weren’t sent by old-fogeys like me, they were sent by teens and young adults. That’s SERIOUS cash for the telecoms which the American telecoms see and want to mimic, but can’t because they’re stuck using old business models based on «only the rich have cellphones.»

Pero lo que me ha resultado especialmente curioso no es ese comentario, sino la respuesta de David Watson. Desde su punto de vista, el uso intensivo que hacemos del teléfono móvil en Europa, especialmente en lo referente a los críos, es una etapa más de la creciente pérdida de la capacidad de mantener la atención:

In a sense, isn’t that what the telecoms are really selling – distraction? Have you listened to what the average teenager says in a cell conversation or an SMS message? I’m obviously way too old to get it, but if I have the option of reading a good book or having meanless conversation on my cell phone (or in person for that matter), I’ll take the book, thanks.

So the question remains – have any of these enthusiastic cell users in europe stepped back from it long enough to look at the long term effects on their children?

Lo que me resulta curioso es lo siguiente: soy un lector habitual, en ocasiones incluso voraz, pero en general, prefiero mantener una conversación, aunque sea por móvil, que leer un libro. Es más, opino que la lectura está muy sobrevalorada (la mayor parte de la gente que escribe sobre la lectura son lectores, por lo que es natural que la defiendan como algo muy valioso). En ocasiones es una entretenimiento genial, incluso una forma genial de obtener información, y la capacidad de leer y comprender un texto es muy valiosa, pero de ahí a tener que convertirse en lector habitual media un trecho. ¿No decía Cioran algo similar sobre campesinos rumanos y filósofos?

Por otra parte, me parece que David Watson confunde comunicación con transmisión de información fáctica. Es decir, se abre un canal y se transmite alguna información por él y lo importante es la información y lo de menos el canal. Pero para los humanos, y es lo que la mayoría de la gente hace con el móvil, abrir el canal es ya comunicación, aunque no se use más que para decir tonterías, porque indica que uno pensaba en esa persona lo suficiente como para llamarla. Lo que habitualmente nos parece charla inane e inútil está lejos de serlo.