Welcome Diamondoid!
It is difficult to say what approach will yield the quickest route, since only modest progress has been made in any of the approaches.
When my time permits, I've been looking at using SPMs in the bootstrap phase. I suspect that DNA engineered bacteria are another approach that may be relatively fast. I'm not aware of anyone making any progress using any of the other techniques you mention to the extent that those two approaches have already demonstrated in the lab.
So you mean like the Nanomedicine books by Robert Freitas (I haven't yet read them)?
Yes, something along those lines. Getting older seems to have made me more interested in nanotech applications of medicine.
There are two more possible usages for de novo foldamer engineering (foldamer being the most general case) B) as "simple" delivery vessels for drugs C) for bootstrapping advanced APM.
Someone is likely to prove me wrong, but I'm not sure that that foldamer engineering will bootstrap advanced APM. At best I suspect it may be a dispensable tool, much like one can use a screwdriver to pound a nail - though a hammer would be the better tool. On the other hand, there is no easy way to use a hammer as a screwdriver.
The reason I think that Eric Drexler has switched his focus is this video of a somewhat recent talk he gave:
Eric Drexler - A Cambrian Explosion in Deep Learning
Thanks for the video. I watched it (being impatient I played it at 1.5 times normal speed - just fast enough for me to still comprehend what is being said while saving some time.) As an aside, where I work, we have noticed that money and investments are flowing toward cyber security and more people are looking to get into it as a way to make money. Companies that can claim to have cyber security products have higher valuations per unit sales revenue than those that don't. I suspect this motivates a lot of interest in the area rather than a genuine interest in security. But maybe I'm being too cynical.
One issue I have with predictions about AI is one that Eric mentions too briefly in his talk: goals and motivations of AI. All living things have a goal built into them due to the way life evolved: perpetuate oneself and one's offspring. Eric states we wont know or will be unsure of the goals AI will have. I don't see why we wouldn't, since unless we explicitly program goals in, the AI will have intelligence but it wont have any motivation to do anything with it. Without goals it wont have motivation to act for or against anything. Probably a good reason not to program in any goals.
It would certainly be cool to make atoms visible in the livingroom but I gave up on this endeavour because:
# I worked on a professional one (Omicron) and realized how hard it is to scan z steps greater than one or two atomic layers.
# Playing around with structural DNA nanotechnology (and even more so for other stuff) requires a full-blown lab (automatic pipetting system ...)
# I'm not sure whether larger DNA meshes can be scanned electrically with STM. If AFM is necessary it gets harder. DNA is strongly negatively charged due to its phosphate groups. If DNA structures sits dry on a surface I guess some alkali metal atoms (Na) remain on there cancelling the charge but I'm pretty sure they will be immobile.
I think of SPMs as one tool of many that will be needed to bootstrap nanotechnology. That an STM has limitations is no different than other tools. Based on my reading of history, I think progress in nanotechnology will only take off once more "amateurs" can begin work on it.
Lipid Rafts come to mind. I heard that they may not really exist but they are everywhere in the literature.
I don't really see how that applies to advanced APM. There I more see that correct and useful old ideas have been and are still tragically misused to judge possibilities/impossibilities in a very different context where they are not applicable anymore.
My read of history of chemistry suggests that debates like the Drexler/Smalley one have happened more than once and progress was held up by the more notable participant. Though it isn't clear to me (yet) whether history provides any lessons in how to avoid or mitigate such things.
In one of the foresight conference videos there was one person presenting his companies goals to produce ultra cheap STM microscopes in masses to accelerate nanotechnology research by making the tools more widely and easily accessible - sadly I can't find that video anymore. I've also forgotten the name of the presenter. It might be "Saed"?? I'm not sure.
There were discussions in the sci.nanotech newsgroup many years ago about developing a cheap STM. I recall discussing it with Steve Vetter and Jim Rice at a Foresight conference. I believe one issue that got in the way was lack of money or capital - and uncertain demand. While a determined amateur can build a marginally working inexpensive hobby STM, buyers of commercial systems have higher expectations and getting a refined product to market is not cheap. Of course, back then we didn't have Kickstarter, GoFundMe, IndieGoGo, or RocketHub as options to raise capital and establish a seed of potential customers.
1) I was visiting the first ever Makerfaire in Vienna Austria showing of my collection of 3D prints.
I also made a lot of graphical Infosheets for A4 flipcharts about 3D printing and APM.
Sounds interesting!
* that the visalisation pictures of cell membranes are basically all very wrong showing way to much lipid layer and way too few proteins going through and showing the size ratios very wrong too.
Yes, the high percentage of membrane that is protein is mentioned in the better texts on the subject. But some definitely imply too much of the surface as lipid.
It seems that only a tiny fraction of molecular biology is really directly applicable to even the early bioinspired stages of advanced APM bootstrapping. I think It'll still take some more time that topic dedicated resources and courses are made.
My interest in the subject is more as an area of problems that can be better attacked by nano robots than as a source for bootstrapping nanotechnology. My impression is that most of the advances in things like DNA and RNA manipulation (e.g. CRISPR/Cas9) appear to be due to discoveries of ancient enzymes that can be turned into tools than clever de novo nucleotide protein engineering.
You seem to have read a lot about history too. This not a place where I usually would spoop around since it is even further away from advanced APM than molecular biology. Since I'm unlikely to read this set of literature if you've found/find something that may suprisingly be applicable specifically to bootstrapping APM dont hold back telling us here. Even if its just a hunch.
Only insight I can note at this point is that false theories held up progress for decades due to the human failing of judging the merit of ideas by who espoused them rather than objective analysis of the ideas. Well, some ideas sounded quite reasonable too and evidence to the contrary was considered due to experimental error, not due to an error in the theory. It seemed to take more evidence than necessary to get a theory in trouble.
You say that you'd like to "design and build some nanotech related tools".
Do you have anything specific in mind?
I do have made quite a set of APM principle demonstration objects by now.
(I need to post a picture)
I'm thinking of a novel design for a scanning probe microscope that I can 3D print. At least the mechanical part. STMs have already been 3D printed and the common plastics like PLA and ABS have decent properties for the purpose (such as low thermal expansion coefficient.) There is at least one piezoelectric plastic that is available (Polyvinylidene fluoride) available from at least one source (http://www.3dogg.com/c-3265319/pvdf-filament/) but expensive. Though my idea doesn't employ piezoelectrics, though more traditional approaches do.
With molecular sciences more and more on the right track and the recent advances in machine learning (deep learning / deep dream)
I think Drexler has switched his main forcus to artificial intelligence (tensorflow & stuff?).
Any reason you think that?
Assuming anyone is still checking in here - I wonder what keeps people from posting. Here's what has kept me from posting:
After I exercised some stock options in the client company that I've done work for the last 10 years and become part owner, I've found an extra incentive to make sure things go well there. We have had a major development project underway for the last year that has sucked my time. So work has kept me busy.
The closest I've come to nanotechnology lately is that I started studying the Kindle edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, 6th edition, by Alberts et al (MBoC) from beginning to end. I've had a copy of the third edition for about 15 years but had only ever used it as a reference; never tried to read it all the way through. As I started reading the 6th edition (to fill in gaps in my knowledge and get more up to date info) I became curious about the history of molecular biology, so I went looking for recommendations on books on the subject. Based on reviews, I bought a copy of Operators and Promoters: The Story of Molecular Biology and Its Creators, by Echols and Gross. Early on it said if I wanted to know more about the period it didn't cover, I should read The Double Helix by Watson and The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology, by Judson. (There is a commemorative edition of the latter that I only discovered later.)
So I read Double Helix, then The Eighth Day, and am just now finishing Operators and Promoters. Once done I'll get back to finishing MBoC. Except I can't help it, I got curious about the history of chemistry, so a copy of The Development of Modern Chemistry by Ihde will be arriving soon.
Lastly, not sure why it took me so long, but bought a 3D printer and downloaded a free copy of DesignSpark Mechanical so I could design the types of things I wanted to print. Fun stuff - if I had more time I'd be designing and building some nanotech related tools. It's amazing sometimes how much time one expends on the allegedly "trivial" aspect of mounting and arranging parts in some apparatus. Sure, it may take hours to print the needed parts, but it can take that long or even longer to do the same using the tools in a garage workshop.
So the Set described in the there discussed tooltip paper ( molecularassembler.com/Papers/MinToolset.pdf ) is not reversible in the bond-topology-state.
Since the goal of the study did not include the additional burden of that requirement, I am not surprised. Efficient reversibility would see a longer-term goal.
I made a 3D model for visualizing the qualitative progression of the energy wells that is necessary for a energetically reversible mechanosynthetic operation. This model is quantitatively disconnect from any particular physical process like e.g. hydrogen abstraction.
apm.bplaced.net/w/index.php?ti…nosynthesis_principle.jpg
I'm afraid I don't know what the image is supposed to be showing me. None of the axis are labeled - do you have some additional context or discussion somewhere?
Alles anzeigenIf mechanosynthesis can't be made bond-topologically reversible from the early on start the only way to get rid of obsolete versions would be by:
* burning them - only possible if they don’t form slack due to incorporated Si,Al,Ti,...
* dissolving them (Sodium beam treatment, Acids, ...)
If even that will not be done we might sink deeply into diamondoid waste.
I think that might be the most severe and most overlooked danger of APM.
I'm probably missing something, but I don't see how one can draw any inference about future tools from the first set of invented tools for molecular carbon mechanical synthesis. I skimmed sections 13.3.7, 13.3.8, and 8.5.2 of Nanosystems and it does not look to me like there are any dangers. Even if none of the released binding energy were stored for later re-use, the universe is awash in thermonuclear energy. I think it is something of a technical oddity that so much of it is temporarily inaccessible. Energetically inefficient nanotech production would still be, on a relative scale, far more efficient than current tech production.
Many thanks for migrating all the posts from the beehive forum to wotlab forum for better maintainability. All the posts seem well preserved
- perfect job.
Also I'm delighted to see that you've implemented my suggestions for sub-forum topics.
Now everything is ready for a great year 2016
I paid the firm http://gconverters.com/ to migrate the posts - it was very inexpensive. So low that I later offered more money to expedite things (but they didn't take it.) I believe the fellow that actually did the work was in Armenia, based on the source of the emails. They probably have developers scattered around the globe.
Anyway, your sub-forum topics did seem good once I found time to give it some thought. All that is needed now is to attract posters. Over the next week or so I'll try to respond to some of your older posts.
Welcome to the Sci-Nanotech Forum
- Jim Logajan
Images attribution: Walterdenkens
While I think functional programming (declarative) should be considered for implementing higher level nanomachine operations (such as long term planning) my understanding is that it is difficult to get predictable performance from existing implementations. For operations requiring real-time responses, such as nano-systems operating in-situ, imperative programming may still be the only realistic choice. Also, the underlying hardware operates imperatively (it has state that changes with time) so there is a mismatch between the declarative notation and what is actually occurring on the machine.
I first used a declarative language about 25 years ago. I had been writing code in imperative languages the previous 18 years (yes, I'm an old coder,) so while I understood the concept, it was not easy to figure out how to express the same program declaratively. That project lasted about a year, after which I did not encounter any use of declarative languages.
Zitat von Lukas (LSUESS)Any news?
I would like to switch to Wotlab Burning Board. It should be pretty straightforward to get the software up and running, but the problem that has kept me from switching is deciding how to handle transfer of user accounts and posts from the Beehive software to Burning Board.
One choice is to simply not do any transfers - instead, keep this board running for a while at a different URL (e.g. http://www.sci-nanotech.com/oldforum ) and alert existing users of the change to the new software and tell them they will need to re-create their accounts on the new forum. Users like yourself could re-post (hopefully via something as simple as copy-and-paste) messages you wanted to preserve from the old forum to the new one. After a couple months I'd then close access to the old forum. You have made the most posts of greatest value and interest - would you be OK reentering them on a new forum?
The other choice is for me to do the transfer of accounts and posts. But if I do such a transfer (there are companies that specialize in that sort of thing that I'd rather hire than spend time myself - it is a non-trivial cost in either my time or money) the two forums use different one-way hash functions, so I'd still have to reset user passwords and send users the new passwords.
Jim
Zitat von JimL (JIMLOGAJAN)I've also played with demos of UBB.Threads and Xenforo, both of which are commercial offerings. In terms of features that I think are useful, Xenforo seems to have the edge.
I kept coming across comparisons of Xenforo to Wotlab Burning Board (https://www.woltlab.com/). So I looked more closely into it - they provide a way for one to create a demo and play with it. After a couple hours of playing around with it, I'm impressed. Cost doesn't appear to be too bad. I may choose that product and purchase it this weekend.
I'm not entirely sure that FUDforum is a good choice. Not a bad choice, but there are some other options I'm considering.
I've also played with demos of UBB.Threads and Xenforo, both of which are commercial offerings. In terms of features that I think are useful, Xenforo seems to have the edge. Two things I would like that seemed to be missing in part from FUDforum are:
Being able to get emailed alerts on selectable forum events (new posts, new threads, new users, etc.)
A quick summary list of all the unread threads or posts that exist, regardless of subforum, in either a chronological or reverse chronolgical order.
I've set up a test-bed that uses the FUDforum software. Here's the URL:
http://www.sci-nanotech.com/fud_sci_html/
Be fore-warned that nothing that gets posted there will likely be kept. I just want anyone reading this to experiment with it and report whether you prefer that forum software (FUDforum) or this forum software (Beehive).
Thanks!
Just an update to anyone interested:
After further research where I took another look at many of the possibilities, my list has narrowed to one of these:
FUDForum
MyBB
My preference is now slightly toward FUDForum.
Development of UBB.Threads appears to have slowed in the past few years. I played with its sample forum. Editing of posts seemed OK enough but felt a tad limited and unhelpful. Creating and editing posts in the two finalists felt much more natural. I also read some of the public interactions between prospects/customers and UBB.Threads company personnel. The company doesn't doesn't seem to interact with prospects much - existing customers seem to provide most of the marketing muscle. In the end it just didn't seem to have enough going for it relative to the other options and extra cost, so I dropped it from consideration.
While phpBB was another contender, it didn't seem to be different enough from the final two choices to add to the list. It didn't help that the developers of phpBB appear to have got strong feelings against indented threaded views; so much so that they will not even make it a user-selectable option. I'm neutral on the issue, but I think users should have that option. It does help that FUDForum can allegedly be integrated with Usenet and email lists, while it isn't clear whether phpBB can be (not that there is any value these days in integrating with Usenet.)
>> I personally prefer open source software mainly out of those reasons:
>> * problems in the closed source parts -> tell them and pray
Problems in open source -> tell them and pray or solve the problem yourself.
>> * company goes out of business -> you're forced to leave the sinking ship
Unless the last release is broken there should be no reason to switch software. I frequent two piloting forums that use vBulletin that stopped upgrading to the latest release of vBulletin years ago - the company may as well have gone out of business. They seem to have survived OK.
>> So if you see major technical advantages (excluding experimental features) in UBB.Threads maybe this is the better solution.
I haven't come to any decision yet about what will replace Beehive. UBB.Threads is only better than Beehive in some aspects; it remains to be seen if it is optimal. I do know that when I try to use a browser on an iPad with Beehive, it can't handle quoting (in fact the quoting mechanism isn't very good in general.) I need to do further research.
I think the most important things are
A.) lots of usage which forces the (big) user community to keep it working and documented
B.) the possibility of easy backup and migration
Beehive appears to have only a modest user community and they don't talk much about how to do backup and restore. So it doesn't rate very well on those important points.
1.) Among the forums I regularely visit the software I most often encountered was phpBB
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpBB -- open source with friendly homepage
That is certainly high on my list.
2.) vBulletin -- this one is proprietary though
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBulletin
I've never liked the vBulletin software and the company appears to have had some past internal problems. Commercial or proprietary aren't an issue so long as support is available and competent without costing great amounts of money.
Might Inyoka be an option ?? -- I'm always amazed about the quality of documentation for ubuntu.
https://ubuntuusers.de/inyoka/
It seems to be a multi purpouse CMS (wiki + forum + blog ?)
I just found this and haven't looked into it in any detail.
First I've heard of Inyoka - looks intriguing but the German I learned in school is rusty, so if there is no English version of the documentation I'm afraid I'll have to pass. I think I would, however, consider Burning Board (https://www.woltlab.com/wbb/) which does provide English documentation.
I guess you know this page already:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…f_Internet_forum_software
Yes. Another site that I also found useful is this one: http://www.forummatrix.org/
I've concluded that while the Beehive forum software has interesting aspects, I'm finding it difficult to use and am equally surprised as other users by some of its behavior. It appealed to me because the threads panel was always visible, so there is no need to constantly navigate back to a main threads window when one is finished reading a thread to move on to the next thread of interest. I consider such navigation reduction important enough to lose some screen real estate. (The better Usenet readers worked this way and it has a lot to commend it in my humble opinion. Certainly the Beehive authors thought so too.)
I haven't ruled anything in or out, but I'm currently considering porting the forum to UBB.Threads (http://www.ubbcentral.com/).
It has the advantage of longevity, widespread usage, and commercial support while not costing very much.
A password reset will need to be done for all existing users regardless of which system this forum gets ported to, so there is that (hopefully minor) annoyance to reckon with.
Anyone with objections, recommendations, or suggestions one way or another please let me know as soon as possible. I'd like to start the migration process within a week or two.
Zitat von LSUESSSome thoughts:
---
- Is it easy to make make backups with this forum SW?
- Since this seems to be not a mainstream forum software migrating might become difficult in the future.
- With AI cracking captchas spam protection becomes a nightmare - my website was attacked pretty soon - worry ...
- (Where do you host it?)
- I've contacted ~30 people (austria) which might be interested checking out this forum.
- ... I might PM you about the last point sometime but not now ...
- I realized that the search function could be made less stringent. I quickly ran in a 30sec timeout.
- The list on the left is hard to read - lack of spaces makes it difficult to see whether its just a second line or the next topic.
- the quoting button doesn't always work
- (are sticky notes possible?)
I'm finally back from my travels (a long planned tour of Scotland) and somewhat caught back up at work (to the extent that is possible) and I started to look into responding to some of the posts of yours, such as the one above, and have belatedly concluded that my choice of the Beehive forum software was a mistake.
The user documentation is almost non-existent - I have to actually examine the source code or experiment myself to learn how to do things. Sometimes very simple things. I'm not sure, for example, if there is an easy way to quote a message and insert replies after each paragraph that I want to address.
I'm going to start a new thread on the subject of migrating the forum posts to different forum software.
By the way, this web site is currently hosted on https://www.linode.com/.
Will try to respond to your posts next week, but I do have a quick answer regarding the fate of the Nanorex software. Fortunately the software was released as open source and can be found here on github:
https://github.com/kanzure/nanoengineer
I can certainly create those folders and move existing threads to them, but it has been found by others (and my own observations) that it is actually counterproductive to create folders too soon in the life of a forum. As categories become evident threads may be created.
I happen to think discussion of applications cannot occur without also their impacts being brought up even when an author of a post tries to avoid it, and vice versa.
Which of the existing threads do you feel should be placed into the folders you have proposed?
quote: Lukas (LSUESS)
IIRC I once heard something along the lines that: "one cannot focus a particle beam (in position space) below what it was at the point of origin because of Liouville's theorem of constant phase space volume (of closed systems?)"**
You bring up many interesting points that I will try to respond to later, but I'll address just the one I quoted:
The system isn't closed because, classically at least, a charged particle moving through the focussing fields will experience acceleration and thus radiate energy away. If it weren't for quantum mechanics the nuclei would most likely first settle into an ever tighter beam line and then eventually slow to a stop, since there are field potentials along every axis.
