Future Ben

I am sorry to say my fictitious trist with Illegal Human Remains Girl is over. I admit we were star crossed from the start. Her an exotic dancer living in a polygamos death cult and I, a bashful struggling futurist. But I had to give a try even if it was only a fantasy.

We met over the internet when her arrest made the news. I never thought I would meet somebody through Boing Boing It was rocky from the begining. I was recovering from a painful breakup, she was in a committed polyamorous sadistic relationship and recieving human remains from her fans. We had our issues. I started to get frustrated when she jumped bail. It was like I was the only one who wanted it to work. And then they caught the young medical student who gave her the hand. It kind of made me check myself. Was this what I had to look forward to? My career in shambles and up to 10 years in prison. It was time for me to reevaluate my priorities.

I thought to myself,”Sure she’s cute…” Oh wait I was just assuming that. I had never seen this girl. Usually I consider it rude to google to somebody without their permission, but she never consulted me before jumping bail so I was a bit mad. An image search for “severed hand woman,” and… It was over.

Come on! You don’t even have dreads or a prominent neck tattoo or facial piercing! What is up with that? At least have some running mascara! I believed in you Illegal Human Remains Girl! I had a whole fictional character and wardrobe that you were supposed to live up to. And you can even be bothered to look all spooky and dangerous then I have one thing to say to you.

Its over!

I stopped blogging for a while because the ownership of the site and its fate were indeterminate. That is an ongoing issue, but what the hell. I write this for me, and it’s not like anyone reads this anyway. There are few futureBen projects in the works. My thesis proposal is almost ready to go. Which means a paper for publication is next. Meanwhile some Madagascar Projects are nearing fruition and Burning Man is coming up. I will start taking breaks from doing stuff long enough to write it up. Up next, a report and pictures from Dueling Reenactments.

Excelsior!

Wow. Thank goodness the US government is devoting its resources to standing up to those nasty environmentalists. No organization is beyond reproach and admittedly, there have been some scandals with CEOs from larger organizations getting paid a bit too much. Still, on earth day, who the hell presents anti environmentalist propaganda?! They even took a quote from Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, about the luddite direction of enviromentalism and streched it into their twisted campaign. I was going to draw some kind of analogy about how inappropriate this is, but anything I can think of would be too insulting for everyone involved.

Wow, imagine that. In the future, when you set your watch 7 minutes fast because you are always late, you know that you’re exactly 7 minutes fast. We’re saved.

Some things are in need of innovation. Better phone reception, faster data trasfer, cures for cancer and aging. Pocket watch accuracy is pretty far down my list of pressing technological needs. It’s true, we could always use a better method of measuring the speed of light. But who needs to pay 6,500$ to have that capability on their wrist. Maybe Jack Abramoff.

It is redundant to say that dirigibles are awesome. For me however they are even better than that. Blimps are so majestic, misunderstood, and underutilized. At one time they were a metaphor for our bold commitment to technology.

Then the Hindenburg happened and humanity showed its true face. Now blimps are a constant reminder of how spineless and sensationalistic we all are. Note that the Hindenburg did go up because of the hydrogen, but the powdered aluminum that coated the envelope didn’t help matters. And most people died from trying to jump out. Besides, come on! What do you want for 1937!
Anyway, Aeros may help lighter than air make a comeback. This one is helium filled, but it can still carry 1.6 million pounds of cargo. I am still waiting for a personal dirigible though.

Our president wants to illegalize all “human animal hybrids.” Clearly, I disagree. Human animal hybrids are real people, living and working among us. They could be your doctor, your physical trainer, even your favorite biotech futurist blogger.

I’m having fun, but therin lies the central phalacy of the president’s arguement. We are simply part of a spectrum of speciation that extends from us to whales to the tiny protoshrew we all decended from. Species occur only because there is a narrow threshold of tolerence for chromosomes to properly separate. The amount of genetic difference needed to cause speciation can be less than a percent. Even so, surprizing crossbreeding is possible as evidenced by Ligers, Beefalo, and even the probably mythical Humanzee.

Furthermore, what constitutes a hybrid? Is a transgenic mouse expressing a defective human gene a hybrid? Would all transgenic animals with human genes become illegal? What about human genes expressed in cell culture? In solving structures of human proteins those proteins are expressed in hamster, insect and most often in bacterial cells. Aren’t those hybrids too. This line of legislature could wipe our half of the NIH! Of course you could generate a gene de novo based on its sequence. Would it still be a human gene if you synthesized it base by base. The president’s statement that human animal hybrids should be illegal is beyond luddite, it is pure ignorance. The horrifying part is that a certain percentage of people will take it seriously.

Whether he is ignorant or not, is it the president’s place to decide what makes us human? Who can answer that question? The answer does not lie in genetics. (I wish it did.) This is the realm of philosophy or even theology. And for that reason I beleive that nobody has the right to define it for me. All I can say is that if the president can pass something that even remotely resembles what he proposes, I am turning to supervillany. Or leaving the country, whichever is more feasible at the time.

MIT hosts a database of “Standard Biological Parts.” The idea is that a Synthetic Biologist can pick and choose these “biobricks,” and assemble a biological machine in the black box style of engineering. Now normally I just complain about the science or new technology featured. This is clearly a work in progress and I will do my best to suspend judgement. They readily admit that this system will be replaced with better paradigms. Here are my thoughts.

I’m doing my best to decipher this biobricks parts registry. I recognize a lot of the names, but their descriptions are are incomplete or less than accurate. Also, with extensive research done on every gene in here and a century of foundation science, why would they make up a whole new lexicon of descriptive terms? Perhaps they want to break from the old, but at the same time they separate the designer from the complexity of the components. An unfortunate side effect is that this obscures the nature of the components. Somtimes it is hard to figure out whether the componet is functioning on the DNA, RNA or protein level. They need to go a lttle deeper before I would use it.

In my own work I keep all of my components such as tags and reporters in a databse that includes their sequences and restriction sites. When I need something I have the all of the data right there. Yes it does get confusing sometimes. I have repeatedly introduced frame shifts or cut out an IRES between bicistronic genes. But the reason for that is my components are not refined yet either. (And I am dyslexic)

Granted, there are some interesting creations made using biobricks, I respect their efforts and hope to contribute to the Synthetic Bio community. However, biobricks seem on par with a scripting language. This is great for doing basic things and maybe that is all we can do with our current understanding. A more fundamental method of design will come however and with it we will accomplish so much more.

This article in the BBC online news is so depressing. How can I convince the children of the world that science is, “all that?” Perhaps when people stop being defensive by acting so proud of their own ignorance. That is the hardest part about science, and what people just do not understand. You have to get used to being wrong a whole lot. And get used to people PROVING you are wrong in front of all your friends. Or even proving yourself wrong. It can be really hard on your ego, and it is too much for a lot of people. Scientists who can’t take that kind of pressure wander the halls of science mere shadows of their former selves. They are called, “Product Reps.”

I’m probably just in a bad mood today, but this report from The Interdisciplinary Canter for Technology Analysis & Forecasting at Tel-Aviv University really annoys me. I’m not entirely sure why though. It may be somewhat accurate for all I know, the annoying part is the commoditization of things that haven’t happened yet. Every investor wants little chips that do things better and cheaper so that they can reduce overhead and raise profit. If a nano/biotech revolution did sweep the world, they don’t understand that it could also destroy commerce. Imagine self replicating and self repairing medical diagnostic equiptment. How do you sell it when anybody can just make a copy? The ultimate technologies will be not only accesible but manufacturable by the smallest mountain village. And the only comodities will be innovation and raw materials. The true revolution will be a reconciliation between industrial and agrarian. And that will be all kinds of bad for multinational corporations and globalization. It is my fervent hope that every single widget they are hoping for is rendered obsolete by something they couldn’t possibly imagine. And all of their planing and panel discussion will have wrought nothing but their doom! As long as I’m dreaming, I would be the creator of that technology. And I would laugh…into the night. I am also bothered by all of those little technologesque illustrations so liberally applied. Those are way tacky.

Always in the sciences we must be impartial, detached and firmly rooted in the present. This is a very important attitude to maintain professionally. But what makes so many people interested in science is the same empassioned forward thinking thinking which every good scientist must surpress. In this personal web site I will explore topics that inspire forward thinking in the life sciences. These things can be interesting new technology or works of fiction. It is inspiration we care about.