Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum An another pseudo science sham: nanotechnology

As if you need an another proof, that the science has been hijacked by pseudo, here comes nanotechnology.

The Feynman idea from 1959 had a seed of truth,
but that truth was in a covert form.
When in 1961 the genetic coding and replication process were discovered, the nature has been proven to implement that idea in the design of life, a few billons years ago.

ES

I'm not sure I understand the argument.

Because nature invented wings 100s of millions of years ago, aeronautics is a sham?

Or is the argument that we're getting nowhere fast? If that's the case, then consider this:

How much time elapsed between da Vinci's design of a calculator and Pascal's contruction of one?

How much time elapsed between the construction of Pascal's first arithmetic calculator and the first digital, stored-program computer?

How much time elapsed between the publishing of "From the Earth to the Moon" and the first person stepping foot thereupon?

You're right to be skeptical. But it seems premature to call nanotech a pseudoscience.

See, you did not read what they claim.
They promise that nanotech will replace all manufacturing technology, and this sort of stuff.

I would respect research, that attempts to create new kind of life machinery, on different chemistry level for example. For that we would need a few geniuses, not a wholesale parasitic establishment. And humanity is yet far from having utilized the existing life machinery - remarkably initially for manufacturing drags, not shoes and computers.

ES

Most technologies are oversold, sometimes because, well the people selling are idiots (every field has its incompetents), sometimes because they're greedy (some venture capitalists), and sometimes because they are honestly mistaken about the obstacles (Turing ref AI).

What good is a telephone or a FAX machine? They are worthless in isolation. What good is a CPU? It doesn't do anything. Decent PCs were available in 1985. They weren't real world until 1995 when corporations started seeing some return on IT investment. You couldn't really do things until around 2000.

Nanotech isn't even born yet. Its researchers must strut like whores to get any funding at all. Head Start (babysitting slum bunnies) has a 30% larger budget than the National Science Foundation (funding all US physical science research).

May you get the future you purchase.

Al on computers, what's decent?

I bought my first Tandy Model 1 computer in about 1978. With all the limitations in memory. connections that could tarnish and silly disk drives costing abou1 $250 each it was not cheap and barely decent but it worked. I was able to write all my office programs in BASIC on the thing.

Compared to what we have now that was massive tech so the new units of today seem like nanotech to me.

Cheers, Jim

I got my first computer in 1969: Well more precisely I got the privilege of keypunching Fortran IV onto cards.

Al ... that monster was extremely productive. I'd still be integrating the area under all of those curves were it not for that machine.

A Neandertal by today's standards ... it beat me with an abacus or slide rule by a very wide margin:
2000 indeed.

There was no evidence that IT improved corporate profit margins in 1985. Word processors were cost of training, maintenance, and upgrade vs. incremental productivity. Most office paper is valueless. Making more faster is not necessarily good.

Spreadsheets were a godsend, but a not insignificant fraction of spreadsheets are also valueless make-work. Drafting software was real value, but boxes at the time weren't quite up to it. In 2005, PowerPoint is the single greatest drain upon accomplishment in an office. When you have nothing to say and 60 minutes to say it in - PowerPoint!

It required substantial social integration of digital electronics at all levels before things could flow. E-mail, the Internet, and search engines were rumors in 1995. By 2000 they were vital. In 2005 all human knowledge is at our fingertips. We can communicate with anybody anywhere for free.

Nanotech is nothing. It is like somebody puttering around with a ten transistor IC. Nanotech applications are scaled down macro-engineering. The world is non-linear. When you start seeing nanotech that makes no sense as macroscopic objects, things are cooking. In the meanwhile, researchers must eat and pay rent while they produce nothing, looking for something.

My first computer experience was 1975, at the age of 15, 10th grade - on punch tape. Ft. Knox High School had a pdp-8 (marketed as an edusystem 25). It had actual core memory. There was no ROM. There was no RAM. As there was no RAM, you have no doubt deduced there was no BIOS, meaning that when you wanted to boot the computer (from paper tape), you had to first load the boot-strap loader. This was done by entering a binary address on the front panel (with toggle switches) and pressing some kind of enter button and then pressing the contents (in binary of course) and then pressing the enter button again. After all the addresses and data for the loader had been pressed, you pressed something like a "GO" or "RUN" button which loaded the OS (from paper tape). The entire process took perhaps 45 minutes to an hour. This was many years ago, so my memory is quite fuzzy. My recollection may be wrong in some details, but I'm pretty sure it's generally correct. In college, I graduated to FORTRAN IV and Hollerith cards. Vast improvement. The evolution about that time frame - 80-85 was astronomical. I did not own a PC (poor student) in that time frame, though I lusted after those of my friends.

One area where I got lucky was being introduced pretty early on (relatively) to the Internet, which may actually have been the arpanet back then. I'm kinda hazy - and wasn't that interested in networking per se at the time. I recall working on text based bbses, multiplayer games, and telneting, ftping as early as maybe 1983-1985 time frame. (Something like that.) I specifically recall a thing called the bitnet relays - something like a primitive version of IRC.
The backbone was, I think, 56 Kbaud links. Our phone connections were 300 bd (mostly), though some people had 1200 bd.

In the 83-85 time frame I was able to get some short-term employment as a programmer for some small companies (a company that made yachts and another that I'm ashamed to discuss). In those days, companies were so desperate they'd hire not only ungrads like myself, but even a few high school students for EXTRAVAGANT rates like $8/hr ... I don't even know if the cardboard-tossers at fed-ex were making that much back then.

The good ole days seemed amazing back then. But even though I well-remember the 45 min boot, I still get impatient when the dual processor behemoth in my office takes 45 seconds.

As technology moves in the positive direction along its axis, so do expectations. Those two functions do not always have the same rate of growth.

Al wrote:
"There was no evidence that IT improved corporate profit margins in 1985"

There is a huge diference between 'evidence related to profit improvement' and your original statement "You couldn't really do things until around 2000" which is what I was specifically responding to. Do I detect a wobble in the force?

I gave clear evidence that you could DO things. Now you are changing the subject to corporate profits.

Different topic.

I ran WordStar in CP/M, in DOS... and my customized WordStar 6 version is still blazing away in an Athlon 55-FX. Nothing beats WordStar for putting prose to screen, and it's great for pounding out clean html code in an unformatted file. Nevertheless, serious stuff is filtered through MS Word for formatting and often ships as pdf. This wasn't doable in real time much before 2000.

Gamers drive tech. Corporate drives volume. What total idiot would buy 10,240 Intel Itaniums for a cluster? NASA! What total idiot then would buy 10,240 Intel Itanium-2s for a working cluster? NASA! Everybody bought IBM in the bad old days. The hardware sucked and ibmdos was crap, but nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

The incremental cost of powering and heating over the lifetime of NASA's Columbia cluster (crash and burn!) will have purchased the same cluster in Opteron-800 series - and it would have worked the first time (admittedly with faster throughput and much larger bandwidth).

I was in the good old days. They were awful. They were only better than the good old days at the time. I still have a manual typewriter and ribbon inker. Can't be too careful... and samizdat will probably make a comeback, though this time in the US.

I'll just repeat myself:

I gave clear evidence that you could DO things. Massive amounts of integrating the area under a curve in integrated Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry outputs to be exact.

Without this a very large pharmaceutical company would have been unable to prove the shelf life of a prescription and that the break-down products were non-toxic. My suspicion is that that pharmaceutical company found a huge amount of profit in having the statistics computing quickly and accurately. In fact I know they made hundreds of millions on the product. And this all on an IBM 370-145. So long before 2000 or 1990 or even 1980 computers made good business ... and financial ... sense. When used sensibly.

I believe Al was either using a bit of hyperbole or was stating an average case concerning the cost-effectness of computers. Obviously computers have been doing an amazing job (compared to normal human abilities) since even before the modern era.