Science

I attended a talk by Don Eigler, an IBM Fellow today; one of the things it reminded me of (other than Science is Cool) was how much I’ve come to loathe the notion of the “ideas man”.

Dr Eigler, twenty years ago, became the first person to assemble something by moving an atom at a time; his most recent work is on a potential breakthough in replacing conventional silicon transistor techniques: he and his colleagues take carbon monoxide molecules and assemble them by standing them up in the (to use his metaphor) egg carton shaped surface of a slice of copper; by building a particular array of them, they can create a logic gate than provides all the logic and storage functions that can be produced with silicon transistors. Very, very interesting; and very impressive—this technique allows them to fit a single logic element that can produce AND, OR, and majority logic in a 12 nm by 17 nm space (for refence, the current smallest commercial silicon is around 45 nm for the smallest trace). If they’re successful in solving a variety of outstanding hard problems (this is, after all, basic research, not engineering), then it has the potential to offer as much as five order of magnitude improvements in computing density and power consumption over existing circutry.

Possibly the coolest thing about the talk, though, was that Don started out by explaining the logic gate in terms of dominoes, discussing how you could use domino fans to create AND and OR gates. I thought this was a metaphor, but no: the carbon monoxide molecules, as I mentioned earlier, are stood upright on the carbon, one atom atop another. If they’re in a pair, they form a stable, upright construction. Add one, and the tower falls over, knocking down the next tower, and the next, and the next, and so on, until your atom-sized dominos have collapsed into the result you want. Dominoes aren’t a metaphor, dominoes is exactly what they’re doing—tiny poisonous dominoes.

(Star Trek fans would doubtless be delighted to know that Dr Eigler could, when discussing real-world use of left-spin molecules to create cloaking devices, referr by name to the Federation-Romulan treaty which prevents the Federation from utilising cloaking technologies.)

In 15 to 20 years, you might be able to buy something based on it. If everything goes well.

Which takes me to the point I opened with. Ideas were tossed around about the sort of things you could do with this kind of improvement in computing densities: since we’ve had demos of using human cell processes to power electronics, a five order of magnitude improvement in power/computational density could presumably make meaningful (by today’s standards) computers be something that can be embedded in the skin and powered by doughnuts.

Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. The kind of person who says, “I don’t do these things, I’m an ideas man” is not only most often a total waste of space—worse in fact, since the injection of “ideas” usually wastes the time of people with work to do—but is perversely proud of doing nothing, as though producing nothing more than a few suggestions places one above the hoi-polloi.

But here’s the thing: Don Eigler was making major advances in the science of the very small twenty years ago, is still doing it today, and could easily work on solving the same group of problems for decades longer. His advances are a result of doing work-hard work that takes time, knowledge, and skill. A room full of moderately intelligent people who work in technical professions can listen to his lucid, articulate explanations of the principles of his work and feel that we understand it but, really, we wouldn’t even know where to begin to actually reproduce it, still less build on it.

Ideas are cheap. Results are gold.

One of the more annoying arguments that I have noticed creeping into the arguments of vaccine deniers, as their arguments based on the fraudulent junk science produced by a shill for a law firm are being more widely understood as disreputable nonsense, is the notion of choice; choice is, apparently, an irrefutable, unassailable right; one may not over-ride the choices of parents who wish to expose their children to disease.

This one really gets on my tits.

My minor objection, one which is commonly voiced with regard to this line of argument, is that because vaccination relies to herd immunity to function effectively across a population this is a choice which is not self-contained. It’s an argument that ought to be treated with the contempt we’d hold for someone arguing they ought to be able to drive drunk because they’re only risking their own life—unless they only drive on private roads, that’s simply untrue. Even the most fervent libertarians usually recognise that the right to swing your fist ends at my nose; the right to kill your kids with whooping cough likewise ends at my daughter’s respiratory tract.

Which leads me into the second, less commonly articulated, but, to my mind, more important point. Children are, in fact “someone else.” We do not allow parents to decide not to educate their children, or to beat them, or hire them out as prostitutes. If parents claim this is undue interference in their rights we say, well, tough luck—because my right as a parent ends at my daughter’s nose. I may not starve her, beat her, or deprive her of an education. Why should I be allowed to prevent her from receiving provably valuable medical treatments?

This is incredibly interesting; I can imagine it becoming not merely scientifically interesting, but an intensely politicised battleground.

In a sense, though, it has a certainly (probably hopelessly naive) intuitive sense of rightness about it; all manner of undesirable genetic defects pop up in men because we don’t have spare copies of genetic material to correct defects, so perhaps the lack of corrective copies also encourages species-wide genetic drifts.

A really fascinating article on the thinking that went into turning Yucca Mountain into a nuclear waste repository. It's an interesting look at how they've throught through the challenges of building for geological time scales.

Kind of a shame it's for housing our crap instead of, say, the artifacts of our civilisation.

I read Douglas Adams’ excellent Last Chance to See soon after it was published; I found the section on the Kakapo particularly moving. Alas, however, the book is rendered forever outdated: there is no lst chance to see one of its subjects, the Yangtze Dolphin. It is gone.

Apparently the ability of a baby to suck nutrients from the mother is the fault of the father.

From this article on very cool research tracking plant and animal spreads between Polynesia and America, we get the gem:

Along the way the new research finally sinks the already fragile Kon-Tiki raft which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl used in 1947 to show that Polynesians may have hailed from South America.

Um, no, retard, it doesn’t. In fact, the person this bumpkin interviewed says it doesn’t when asked. What sunk Heyerdahl’s theory is the genetic evidence that links Polynesians to migrations from East Asia, not South America.

If anything, it underlines one of the more important bits of Heyerdahl’s work: that the technology available to the peoples of the era really did allow them to reliably sail huge distances.

Is having a reporter who actually knows what they’re writing about—or at least capable of enough research to fake it well—too much to ask?

Once more I am living in the future; the Respectful Insolence blog details a drug treatment that could hammer a wide variety of genetic disorders; by acting on a common factor in mutation it could alleviate what are a wide variety of disorders with a common root cause.

The things you find in Borneo. Until it’s, you know, cut down for cheap furniture.

Genotyping claims to demonstrate link between gene, metabolising caffiene, and heart attacks. So where’s my test?