Playing with atoms at IBM

March 17, 2008 By Josh

What a fun day. IBM invited me over to its research building, where we moved atoms around with a tunneling electron microscope (among other things).

I shot some videos with my Qik cameras while Rocky was setting up his HD camcorders. The quality is low, but that’s because they didn’t have a 3G network up there so I needed to turn down my cell phone to a lower quality setting. Qik rocks because it pushes the videos to YouTube now.

Here’s the videos:

A look at a machine that lays materials down at the atomic level. They are using this machine to try to find a new way to store information that will be 100 more dense (or maybe even more) than what’s possible with CMOS. At three minutes in you meet the guy who runs the lab. The engineer says that this machine can “airbrush with atoms.”

I got several videos inside the office where they are using the scanning tunneling electron microscope. You know it’s a cool lab when there’s a barrel of liquid nitrogen underneath the desk. Part I (why keep it cold). Part II (why keep it silent). Part III (a drawing done with individual atoms).

A look at the world’s first hard drive (which was invented in the lab, so was the relational database, among other things we all take for granted now).

Starting Wednesday we’ll have a daily show up on FastCompany.tv. This series will be up in a few weeks after we edit it and all that. I just wanted to give you a taste of what we saw today with our Qik cameras.

Thanks so much to the researchers who spent time with us:

• Shivakumar (Shiv) Vaithyanathan, PhD, Manager, Unstructured Information Mining
• Mark Dean, PhD, IBM Fellow, Vice President, Almaden Research Center
• Chris Lutz, PhD, Low-temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Atom Manipulation scientist
• Markus Ternes, PhD, postdoctoral scientist
• Sebastian Lutz, PhD, postdoctoral scientist

It’s amazing that science has progressed to the point where an idiot like me can pick up an iron atom and move it around to some place else with a click of a mouse.

Why does this science matter to all of us? Well, today’s hard drives need hundreds of thousands of atoms to store data. Think what they could do if they could get it down to a few atoms? Or, maybe, even one? They are doing research to find out if that’s possible, and, even if it is, what patterns of atoms work best?

Oh, and you know how electronics work? By doing things with electrons. The thing is, almost all of our electronics work by doing something with the charge of the electrons.

Today IBM showed me that they are able to study something else: the spin of the electrons. They are excited by being able to do that because it will let them get even more information density than they thought was possible previously.

Thanks to Seagate, my sponsor, for making it possible for me to go around the world and do stuff like this. I have a feeling a few of their researchers are gonna watch these videos. ;-)

You can read a lot more about what we saw today on Google.

Filed Under: iControl, Matt Mullenweg, scoble, Strategy

Facebook disabled my account

January 3, 2008 By Josh

If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account. I’m appealing. I’ll tell you what I was doing as soon as I talk with the developers who built what I was using and as soon as I talk with Facebook’s support (I sent an email in reply to the one below, but haven’t heard back yet).

I run this stuff so you don’t have to. :-)

UPDATE: Rodney Rumford, who runs the FaceReviews Blog about Facebook says that all traces of me have been already removed from Facebook too.

UPDATE2: Tonight I learned about DataPortability.org and signed my name to that effort.

UPDATE3: I was only kicked off for about a day, they added my account back after I made a public stink about it here.

I am working with a company to move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service. Here’s the email I received:

+++++

Hello,

Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.

We reserve the right to take any appropriate action in connection with any activities that violate our Terms of Use and/or applicable laws, including termination of your account and pursuit of legal remedies.

Please reply to this email.

Thank you,
Facebook Customer Support

Filed Under: Facebook app

Robot helicopter attack video

October 3, 2007 By Josh

Here’s the autonomous robot helicopter video that we saw at Stanford University. Rocky is cheering on the robots to attack me and one does.

The full video with interviews with the team members that explain what these things are and how they work will be up next week.

Basically they have laser and other sensors that can see the ground. The team is trying to come up with a helicopter that can fly itself without a pilot being involved. Partly for doing military work so that they could send one of these into a hostile situation to get video and other data. But these might have other uses as well. They can fly for about 20 minutes on one charge, cost about $10,000 to build, and have a few computers on board and lots of sensors.

We’ll also have other videos up next week that we filmed at Stanford. Rocky Barbanica filmed this and tells me he also has the first mid-air collision of these robots captured on tape too.

Filed Under: robotic cars, startups