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May 8, 2008

This is a great research web site: www.singularity.com and then click on "Resources".

The site supports a book written by uber-computer scientist Ray Kurzweil. The book is called "The Singularity is Near," with a telling subtitle of "When humans transcend biology." The book is full of great futuristic stuff and predictions. The web site tracks research in many areas, with an emphasis on Kurzweil's big 3, GNR: genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics (aka machine intelligence).

A quick peek today shows the following cool stories:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1766219,00.html - research into the mathematics behind a Star Trek-like cloaking device
• http://istresults.cordis.lu/index.cfm/section/news/tpl/article/BrowsingType/Features/ID/81616 - research into machine consciousness in the form of a robot modeled after a 2 year-old
• http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp - DARPA announces its "Urban Challenge", a contest to design a robot car that can independently drive itself in traffic. You may have heard about or seen the PBS show on DARPA's "Grand Challenge"... this is the next step.

I can't remember the last time I surfed Kurzweil's site and didn't find something interesting or amazing to read.

enjoy... yow, bill

Apr 12, 2006

Press announcement from Oct 4, 2005 of the successful creation of an NRAM wafer:

www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D4904

The leading company (I believe) in this technology is Nantero:

• Their home page: www.nantero.com
• And a cool little flash movie explaining how NRAM memory works (movie link at the bottom of the page): www.nantero.com/mission.html

This technology got an award (and a nice description of its potential) at:

 www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_emerging.asp?p=6 ...

Did you catch some of those numbers? Nanotubes have the potential of storing trillions of bits per square centimeter. By my math, that a terabyte (1 trillion bytes) in a square inch of chip. And of course, lower power, faster access, static memory, resistant to radiation and other environmental nastiness... Jeez!

Apr 3, 2006

Gosh, Wikipedia is great, especially for tech stuff. These are some nice history and introductory pages on transistors:

• The transistor - The Nobel Prize winner in 1956, 50 years ago attributed to Shockley, Bardeen, and the other guy
• CMOS transistors - a very popular flavor of transistor these days... this is the page with the nice layout diagram of a transistor
• Integrated circuits - a collection of transistors on a single chip
• Robert Noyce - primary contributor to the invention of the integrated circuit
• Gordon Moore - the "Moore" in Moore's Law

Finally, this is a fun Java animation of a CMOS transistor at work:

http://tech-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/applets/cmos/cmosdemo.html

Mar 29, 2006

One of the first mechanical computers, created by Charles Babbage, in 1822:

The Difference Engine

We plunged into the assembly language pool last lecture. That example came from the Patterson & Hennessy text. Some of that text is available from a site peddling a program called SPIM. SPIM is a Mips assembly language simulator:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~larus/spim.html

Last one (I promise)... regarding the "history" of computing, my first computing experience was on a TRS-80 from Radio Shack back in the late 1970's. The secondary storage or "disk" for this machine was a cassette recorder. Ha!