Gender Roles and Women in Power: An Uncomfortable Fiction
Writing with a split personalitySlime Mold: great grand-daddy of Star Trek computers?
Slime Mold
I stumbled across some technical documents in my info-surfing last night that really gave me pause. Scientists are experimenting with physarum polycephalum – slime mold – to establish the basic functions of bio-computing. That is to say, they are making programmable ‘machines’ out of slime mold, using its ameboid biostructure as a basic computing device.
Is that mind-boggling or what?
In Star Trek Voyager, the Voyager was the first of the Trek ships to incorporate “bio-neural gelpacks.” Trek designer/illustrator Rick Sternbach describes these as organic parts of the computer core, “which contain synthetic neurons suspended in a gel medium and which can process information faster and more efficiently than the older isolinear chips.”
What initially caught my eye about these research papers is not the subject matter, but the fact that when I first saw it I didn’t understand a thing I was reading. Also not knowing the scientific name of slime mold at first glance, my first thought was, what’s a physarum, and how can they make a computing machine out of something organic? I laughed out loud! It felt like being six years old again, confronted with Grown-Up Words and some concept that was sophisticated and brand new to me, like “optimism” (the first word I had that experience with, actually). I had to read other things before I could parse the sense out of statements like,
“[T]he plasmodium is [a] unique biological substrate that mimics universal storage modification machines, namely the Komogorov-Uspensky machine.”
Just reading “biological” and “machine” in the same sentence creates cognitive dissonance, but a happy kind of dissonance that says, “Woohoo! Something totally new!”
So there you have it, folks. Mad scientists working with ameboid slimes in the laboratory are building the computing devices of the future.
Now if we can just get the warp drive thing down, we’ll be ready to roll.
~~
For the science fans among you:
A search at the above-linked site on “physarum’ will turn up related papers, as well.
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
GoodReads
Google +
Star Trek is turning real dangerously quickly!
I don’t think we’re ever going to get a Data, though….
Maybe not this century, but I think it’s only a matter of time…
Here’s an interesting factoid stuck in my head. In an old book called “The Making of Star Trek” (about the original series), Gene Roddenberry remarked that after the show was on the air, they were approached on the quiet by some business types who inquired where they had gotten their information from regarding the diagnostic medical beds. Apparently this was uncomfortably close to a project under actual development by some unnamed company, and industrial espionage was suspected, or at least some sensitive information leak. In fact, of course, the beds, and the hand-held mediscanners (which were in fact salt shakers) were extrapolations from Roddenberry and other writers/designers’ science fiction imagination.
Then of ocurse there are cell phones, invented by Dr. Martin Cooper, who credits the Star Trek hand-held communicator as being his inspiration for the technology.
Is that too cool, or what?
I love Star Trek (especially the Next Generation). But taking physics and chemistry classes has made me realize that a lot of the technobabble in Star Trek is just that…babble. Not that it ruins my enjoyment of the shows or anything…