I’ll be 82 years old in 2050 and, good health willing, able to see if artificial intelligence researcher David Levy’s prediction about robot marriages comes true or putters to the earth like my Simpsons movie prediction.

Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, “and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.”

Levy’s prediction isn’t nearly as juicy as Henrik Christensen, founder of European Robotics Research Network who says people will be having sex with robots by 2011. If by now you’re not saying Bicentennial Man aloud you lose sci-fi geek points.

Indeed the movie with Robin Williams playing a robot who’s 200 year journey to become a human belongs in this story. While we think about what humans want to do with robots, when will robots want to become humans? I’m not expecting that question to be answered in my lifetime, but it’s conceivable happening in one or two generations of my survivors. With the massive amount of storage space continuing to come down in price, it won’t be too long before we can carry around enough storage to record our entire life.

As for robots becoming more human-like in not only appearance but desire? It’s not a question of “could” to me but when? And if they become more like us as in the movie with Robin Williams, will they also want to face our mortality? On its face the robot sex and robot marriage thing seems a bit weird, but it’s the underlying social questions that are more intriguing.

Would you want to live forever if you could? It’s a fascinating subject whether or not we might want to be immortal I covered a bit back in June 2006.

Robot sex or robot marriage seem weird? Nah, those topics aren’t that futuristic, let’s talk about robot sentience. AI still has a long, long way to go.

Forget 4GB or 8GB flash drives, forget polyethylenedioxythiophene, forget 30GB, 80GB or 160GB hard drive based players, in a few years it will be possible to put a terabyte (TB) in a very small package. Goodbye to messages like this:

Although no 1TB iPods, Zunes or other portable music/video devices exist yet, you can safely wager they are coming. Even if PMC turns out to be a bust.

I was somewhat surprised our CD collection wouldn’t fit on the Zune 30GB. It took nearly a month of time here and there ripping the CDs to MP3 at 320kbps/44 for a total of 4,927 songs, 42.3 GB. The collection does fit easily on our 80GB iPod, so maybe it’s time for me to update to the Zune 80 (if I can find one somewhere, I hear they are hot sellers at the moment).

PMC plans to put an end to these kind of concerns in a few years. PMC might even allow me to re-rip our collection in FLAC or some other lossless format. PMC will slow aging.

Ok, joking on the last one.

PMC stands for programmable metallization cell and was created by scientists at Arizona State University. In April 2009 the first PMC memory chip is going into production via tech.co.uk:

The new memory uses nano tech to charge copper particles on the molecular scale, making it 1,000 times more energy efficient as current flash memory.

Managing a music collection larger than fits on a Zune
Running out of space did yield one side benefit, to look at the situation positively: I was able to pick and choose exactly what music would be synced. It’s been awhile since I’ve run into space issues with a portable music player.

Choosing what music to sync on the Zune is a matter of dragging individual songs, albums or artists down to the icon in the lower left corner. The Zune will update while you work. It didn’t lag far behind how fast I chose the music from the total collection. I’m not sure about you, friendly reader, but I found a significant amount of music in our family’s collection that I didn’t care to have on the Zune.

I asked our youngest teenager to help me pick a few of his favorite artists. Syncing playlists works similarly. Just click and drag the created playlist to the icon to the Zune device graphic.

It’s too bad these small TB devices aren’t here already, but since I’ve been getting more into HD quality video, I can see the out of space messages appearing for video content. Word to the scientists, hurry up and get us a petabyte storage in small packages for video. I’m positively that, health willing, I’ll be around to see the day that we can comfortably pack around our entire entertainment collection: music, videos, books, magazine.

Looking forward to it. You?

Must admit I’ve never thought of the problems presented by having sex in space, but thankfully the brains at NASA have already done the calculations. We can’t figure out world peace, but we can figure out how let astronauts make love in space.

photo credit (CC): computerhotline

NASA studied sex in space over 11 years ago according to an article in the guardian.co.uk:

Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. “Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even NASA was only given a censored version.”

Doesn’t sound like we’ll be seeing the instructional Astronauts Do It On The Moon hitting store shelves any time soon. Now if only Paris Hilton had been on the moon, we’d know all about this stuff. Forget the mile high club, that’s for amateurs.

Seriously, I wonder if in my lifetime I’ll have the opportunity to travel into space? Sex would be one of the last things on my mind up there but I can understand how astronauts having to be up there for weeks and months would think about these things.

Where am I going with this post? I’m ejecting now, Houston.

Ever heard of the amazing product aerogel? It’s the lowest density product currently known to man, 50-99.5% air and yet theoretically can hold 50-4,000 times its weight in applied force.

Maybe you’ve heard aerogel’s nickname ‘Frozen Smoke’? Perhaps I missed this one in science class — never my best subject — but this sounds extremely useful.

Invented over 75 years ago by an American it has been used more by NASA than anybody else to date, but is growing in practical uses like strengthening tennis rackets and even cleaning up pollutants. Somebody ring up Al Gore, aerogel is green!

Check out this detailed article from maltaStar:

In the laboratory, a metal plate coated in 6mm of aerogel was left almost unscathed by a direct dynamite blast. … Aerogel is described by scientists as the “ultimate sponge”, with millions of tiny pores on its surface making it ideal for absorbing pollutants in water.

In 2018 the first manned mission planned for Mars is including spacesuits lined with aerogel. Have aerogel, will travel.

When chemistry professors are labeling something an “amazing material” it’s time to renew faith that if man can create this, he (or she, no sexism here) can and will find cures for diseases. Now if only some super IQ brain could figure out how to make human beings not go to war and kill each other needlessly. Don’t laugh, aerogel is already being used in the military.

How long before aerogel could be used as an aphrodisiac and complete the cycle of real world uses? Too crude suggesting aerogel has viagra properties? How long before Mashable creates a ‘god’ list of 300+ aerogel uses? You got me, I’m joking on the last two three.

Aerogel? Right on.

About to post something online and have a powerful thought wash across you that says don’t? Scientists have found where that is coming from. Just think Run DMC, no, actually it’s called dFMC. Say it aloud a few times right now just so you get it straight: dFMC, dFMC, dFMC. Feel better? Don’t mind the strange looks of co-workers, family or friends. They have dFMCs too. Location pictured above, explanation below:

Brass and Haggard find that a brain region just above and between your eyes — the dorsal fronto-median cortex or dFMC — is specifically designed to let you pull back from doing something you were just about to do.

The next time you see your favorite blogger (or insert here ____) make an ill-advised move — or maybe you just didn’t listen your self — just point to this post and say: “you should have listened to the dFMC.” It’s like the Force, only it’s in every one of our brains. Luke, I am your fathhhhheerrrrr.

No dFMC was avoided during the creation and publishing of this post.

Fascinating look up close at the sun.

Watch it jiggle and pulsate and feel a tan coming on from the comfort of your PC. The link mouseover sounds are a nuisance, but the sights are pure eye candy. See sunspots, a solar tsunami and be glad you’re sitting far, far away.

A study finds that men are almost as talkative as women. This doesn’t surprise me as I never believed the stereotype. Did you?

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day. The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

What would be interesting is to be able to map the context of conversations with men versus women. Would women talk more about relationships than men? Would men talk more about sports than women? Would men be more geek prone than women? All the blog related conferences I’ve attended have been predominantly male, so who’s talking about gadgets and devices more in daily, regular conversation? Who would talk about sex more?

I’m not curious about these because of redefining or defining sterotypes but I’d love to see more studies that shatter them. Guess we’ll need to keep waiting for the context study.

Earlier today I mentioned AT&T’s DNA being faulty and it seems a four year study on DNA published in Nature has scientists challenging the notion that “junk” DNA is valueless.

In a departure from traditional thinking, the four-year study says that genes can no longer be considered the only active parts of DNA and that huge segments thought to be “junk” may play a significant role in such individual traits as susceptibility to diseases.

This makes me wonder about the true possibility of the whole Jurassic Park thing when here we are still learning new things about DNA. There are lots of ethical concerns over cloning and it disturbs me that we’re cloning when we are learning new things about what our greatest scientific minds believed to be junk. Sure, this is human DNA, not an animal, but if it was believe this DNA is junk then what else wouldn’t we know?

I’m sure someday full human being cloning will occur. It’s inevitable. Ever see the movie The 6th Day? Perhaps not one of Arnold’s best movies, but it makes you stop and think about the ethical challenges with human cloning. You could see some cases where people cannot let go of loved ones due to tragic loss, so they are compelled to have a clone made. The slippery slope starts with pets which isn’t as offensive a prospect as cloning humans. Rent the DVD if you haven’t seen it.

The blueprint of our DNA shows that there is a limited cycle and our time is short on Earth. If scientists find a way to stop the cell breakdown and growth we better have another planet to inhabit because overpopulation will become a very real problem.

One thing we can conclude: this is further proof that the human body still remains a huge mystery.

Autistics have more difficulty picking up on social cues like knowing when a conversation lasts too long and a device is being developed to help according to this article by NewScientist.com. The device is called the “emotional social intelligence prosthetic” (ESIP) and is being developed by MIT students El Kaliouby, Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters. In short ESIP is a small camera with special image recognition software. The person with autism would put this on and it would analyze the reactions of the person being talked to and begin to vibrate if the machine detected boredom or irritation.

The curious thing to me about the device is that during the study phase it proved more difficult to detect the emotions of ordinary people than actors.

The software picks out movements of the eyebrows, lips and nose, and tracks head movements such as tilting, nodding and shaking, which it then associates with the emotion the actor was showing. When presented with fresh video clips, the software gets people’s emotions right 90 per cent of the time when the clips are of actors, and 64 per cent of the time on footage of ordinary people.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I mean, shouldn’t professional actors be able to fool machines with their emotions better than ordinary people? Or does their overacting make it easier for machines to figure out their emotions?

Let’s put aside machines and autism for a bit and talk about difficult social cues. Boredom is more challenging to interpret than irritation. I have trouble understanding if my wife is bored sometimes and we’ve been married almost 20 years but have absolutely no problem telling when she is irritated. There is this icy type of stare that could cut diamonds in half. Happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, all fairly easy emotions to interpret. Boredom is a bit more tricky because some people feign interest out of courtesy. Maybe that’s what trips up ESIP with ordinary people.

When/if these MIT students ever fully develop the ESIP they should explore offfering as a supplement for podcast and videoblogging viewers. When the listener or viewer starts to get bored or irritate a negative vote could be sent back to the creator so they can better detect the weak spots in their production. Auto content feedback and voting. For that matter, keep it going and expand into text. How about an RSS reader that while we read automatically skips past boring posts and remembers which publications had the most boring content and automatically unsubscribed.

Someday.

Near the top of my favorite Scotty lines in Star Trek The Original Series is: “Check the language banks and find out what … a ‘heater’ is?”

That comes from episode #49 from the second season: A Piece of Action where an alien world is evolving around a book from the roaring twenties. The ‘heater’ in question is a weapon.

Scotty died in 2005 and his ashes were flew into space. Amazon Web Services evangelist and Syndic8 guru Jeff Barr’s wife Carmen is a real estate agent here locally and was negotiating the sale of Scotty’s house. How did that work out, Jeff?

I had assumed Scotty’s ashes would be floating around space for a long, long time exploring the galaxy but that was not the case.

The payload was found in its designated recovery zone 20 days after Farmington, Conn.-based UP Aerospace sent it up in a 20-foot rocket on April 28.

The rocket, the first to be successfully launched into space from the fledgling Spaceport America in southern New Mexico, made a 4-minute suborbital flight before drifting back to Earth.

From this are we to assume there is no way to tack along our ashes when we exit this life on a probe visiting other galaxies?