 |
|
October 2000
A new type of encryption for data security in a paranoid age
Hey this is getting difficult...
Animals and (more so) birds use feathers as a way to adjust and minimise the turbulence over the flight surfaces and control surfaces of their bodies. This is how sharks can swim faster than boats and the Peregrine Falcon can swoop at over 200 miles per hour (clocked in Russia at over 212mph!) which is faster than a body that size (surface area) should be able to fall! This is because they adjust the surfaces in a way that totally eludes man, cutting drag by massive amounts. Recently, Speedo, the swimwear company, along with several other companies, have marketed sharksuits, which mimic sharkskin. Aerospace companies are trying to copy this process for fighter planes and cargo lifters, hoping to shave a few fractions of a percent off the fuel usage. If you can develop a material to achieve this, you WILL be rich by Christmas! Think a type of moleskin which can be varied by the adjustment of electric field, magnetic field, or some form of pressure transducer. Think of a type of artificial hair. If you want to get really clever, try an artificial feather, with internal structure...
Well, that was a short ten days! Seems incredible to think I typed the below that long ago.. Well, I watched a bit of TV, a show called "Crusade", which is a spin-off from Babylon 5, which is in turn a great series. This episode was dealing with the problem of space travellers releasing nano-tech viri into the earth's atmosphere. If you read "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, he also has a few points regarding nano-tech. Along with the micro-fly, a new, "small" spy-plane that DERA have under development, (Only 6" long, so it can fly in a window unobserved! Honestly...) and the latest generation of CMOS cameras which are light and tiny, a new counter-surveillance system might be required. How about a giant version of the electronic zappers used for killing flies in chipshops? Using the same system, those in hotter climes could leave the window open, and the system would nuke any invading mosquitos and bugs, nanites and spy-plane robot birds would also have a much harder time. Real birds, of course, would see the mesh, and turn away, but low-resolution cameras would not, and so too would the eye not see the mesh, as we would look through it in the same way as a pane of glass. The electrical interference and high-frequency noise would also be quite handy for jamming audio bugs, so you could set that on and off as an option (for when you aren't watching TV!)
STOP PRESS: This will soon be available for the palm pilot!
The Brain, from Natrificial inc. is a brilliant piece of software. You can download the demo free for 30 days. I keep it on my desktop always, and find it very useful for plugging ideas into. (If I had a credit card, I would buy it!) Imagine it with a system like Jasc's Quick View, "With support for over 200 file formats, Quick View Plus lets you view all the attachments and files you want, instantly." combined in. There are several other software packages with similar systems, such as Inxight's Site Lens, and their software has features that others lack, such as a full text search.
Now, it seems to me that an entire operating system based on this system of non-linear relationships would be great for any palmtop or other small machine. So, anyone fancy writing an OS based on it? Other ideas will be needed to improve the situation far enough to form an entire operating system, but with a touch screen PDA, I think the market would be massive. For Desktop machines, which now hold millions of bytes of data and many thousands of files, users would be able to find the information they saved offline, or wrote in a spreadsheet so much more easily. The trend has definitely started, with Microsoft using the "My Documents" and "desktop" folders, and shortcuts to hide the real location of the data. Read more here.
Return to RubberTreePlant index