Focus After the Shot! Science Fiction Photography!

Anyone that has known me for any time at all knows that I have been an avid photographer (didn't say good, just avid!) since the late 60s. I tend to be a bit old fashioned in how I like to shoot and what I shoot with. To be honest though, I did take to digital in the 90s and barely looked back. However I still shoot with a SLR just that it has a D on it now. One thing among many that has always been a bit of a bother was getting the focus sharp. Auto focus is at best a stop gap because you never quite know exactly its choosing to focus. Now what would it be like to focus AFTER the picture has be taken. Something right out of science fiction right? Not any more!

Digital ants are here, tending SCADA

 Errin Fulp, a professor of computer science at Wake Forest University, is training an army of "digital ants" to turn loose into the Grid to seek out computer viruses trying to wreak havoc on the system. This according to a recent article in NewsWise, which notes: that "As the nation's electrical power grid becomes more interconnected through the Internet the chances of cyber attacks increase as well..

Dr. Fulp's digital ants "could have wide-ranging applications",  Newwise writes, "on protecting anything connected to SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) networks, computer systems that control everything from water and sewer management systems to mass transit systems to manufacturing systems."   Image courtesy SCforum.info

Reasons why you will never store you "mind" online

Dvice blog has postulated that a person's mind will never be "living" online or digitally. There are some good arguments made...I am sure some counters are available as well? So here goes

Even the most reliable service crashes at the most inopportune moment. Without constant "backup" you would be in trouble in short order.

Digital storage media wears out alarmingly fast. Forget thinking.... constant backups, refreshes, and format updates, would be the rule of the day.

Power consumption. Your brain works on 25 watts. As the article states, Google takes 100 megawatts just to do a simple index, imagine what it would take just to power up the processing power of the human brain let alone enough power to let it think?!

Processing power. The brain in theory can do about 10 quadrillion calculations per second, or 10 petaflops. IBM's Blue Gene/P supercomputer has a maximum theoretical limit of around 3 petaflops. But you say...well get three and you have enough...well not really, neuro-scientists now are certain that a neuron does more than just flip on and off to store data, but may in fact process and encode the data which in my mind ups the anti in a BIG way.

People forget that the brain is a management system for the body as well. The nervous system collects data and feeds the brain constant amounts of high bandwidth data every fraction of a second of the day. Without this constant stream of data, the mind soon stops functioning in any useful way. So now we are up to huge data loads, massive processing and unbelievable amounts of power.....

So it soon becomes evident that with all of this infrastructure will not be available, even if it worked, to everyone...wana guess who goes and who doesn't?

soooooooo lets say that all the problems are solved and everyone goes over...who does maintenance? Robots? ok, so who maintains them? and so on .......and we are counting on it all working perfectly forever?

The article really goes a lot more into depth. Read more here over at Dvice

MISSILE GAP by Charles Stross — Online For Free

Subterraneanpress.com , in their blog just printed this!

we (along with the estimable author, Charlie Stross), have decided to make the full text of the just nominated for a Locus award novella, Missile Gap, available online for Free over at Subterranean Online. Enjoy! Thanks also to the kind folks who voted in the Locus poll, making Subterranean a finalist as Best Publisher.

This is really a cool thing that Subterraneanpress has decided to do, I know I am certainly going over to take a look, and from what I see, there is plenty to keep even the most jaded reader happy for some time! Take a look.

and for the person who said single pixel cameras were impossible!

Made up of millions of photodetectors, the sensors in today's digital cameras don't come cheap, and they don't go easy on the juice either. At Rice University in Houston, Texas, developers are determined to make a single-pixel camera that will be able to capture high-quality images and turn wasteful million-pixel cameras into a thing of the past. Using a single photodetector would also simplify the process of swapping sensors, hinting at cameras that can switch into ultraviolet or infrared modes with ease.

Mirrors are used to build up the image. Light is taken in through one lens, bounced off a digital micromirror device, through a second lens and onto a single photodetector.

Currently still in the experimental stage, the single-pixel camera is about the size of a suitcase.