Here comes Graphene... sharpen your pencils!

Reading about research and development around carbon-based, two dimensional, nano-worldly Graphene has been a lot of fun. If you're just ramping up as well, I thought I'd jot down some of my collected notes to help others on their way to good knowledge of Graphene.

First of all, Graphene is a one atom thick, 2-D slice of graphite, the "pure" stuff in your 2H pencil. It looks like a cross-section of a honey-comb with carbon atoms in a chicken wire-like pattern. Scribble on a piece of paper, take some scotch tape and left up your carbon-based jottings. Then desolve the tape with a solvent, like Benzene, and you're left with a few (or more) layers called Graphene.

Now, some tidbits or "reasons to care"...

1. Graphene is the strongest material known.
2. It's the thinnest membrane known, in the lab, to separate two bodies of liquids.
3. Pop a hole in a sheet of Graphene a few carbon atoms wide, you have a "nanopore". Drag a strand of DNA through it, you can figure out its sequencing (all that G, T, C A stuff). FAST.
4. Thanks to its incredible conductivity, it may eventually replace silicon as chip fodder. It's 100x more conductive than silica and isn't it nice it's not environmentally toxic as those other silica alternatives, like gallium arsenide?
5. As part of the quest to utilize Graphene as laid on substrates of silica, researchers are working heavily on getting the signal-to-noise ratio ramped up to maximize all that good conductivity.
6. Nanotubes are rolled up single layer sheets of Graphene.
7. Because of its high conductivity, Graphene makes great sensor devices, able to detect substances and get the word out quickly.
8. Graphene may represent a new class of capacitors, thanks to its conductivity and extremely large ratio of surface area to mass.

Lost the article I grabbed some of these details from. I'll post the link as soon as I find it. The bit about nanopores came from http://www.physorg.com/news203345672.html

Hope you found this helpful and now see Graphene as slightly less mystifying.

Server software architecture technology today... a "drive by" appraisal

A colleague at my company distributed a couple of links on MUD -- "A BIG BALL OF MUD is haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle." from A Big Ball of Mud.

I never liked chaining (object methods end-to-end, ad nausem) because it made me feel stupid... It always came off as the "cool" thing at the expense, to me, of clarity. It also felt like a side-effect of IDEs where you just keep getting a drop-down pick list of methods once you complete the previous method name. I know I'm ridiculously blue collar about using vi instead, but what I like about it (being the absence of an IDE) is that it forces you to become more knowledgeable about the object/class definitions you're referencing. You know at some point you're going to have to track down a bug and wouldn't it be nice if you've already explored that deeper code, often written by somebody else. It gives you the extra layer of perspective you need when bug-chasing...

Yes, architectures are beginning to feel commoditized. But I like that. It's like design patterns. When Microsoft came out with C# it pissed me off, big time, as a rip-off of my beloved Java. But then I realized that the favor MS did for all of us was to raise the conversation to the next level of design patterns where the implementation details became less important. My guess is that was not MS's intent, but I believe it was a favorable consequence.

Anther advantage (or consequence) of commoditization is that these architectures are beginning to feel canned and the tools that support them are like-wise starting to feel that way, as they continue to mimic each other... Grails-Rails... does it really matter other than some business considerations?

But I have become a believer in the programming-by-convention. Yes, it goes overboard when you realize so many methods have been automatically created (views, controllers, services, session variables, etc.). But at least there's a higher level of "local standardization" that anybody who dives into the project can expect. I used to like thinner, start-from-scratch architectures... but it's so incredibly silly to have to re-think how to track session, how to send email, how to configure security, how to do things you've done a few hundred times over the past 15 years.

How's that for a preach-y entry?

from a budding post-biologist... check your fears at the door

Well, I probably won't live long enough, but I still love to play in this sandbox...

I hope you've come across the book "The Coming Singularity" by Ray Kurzweil or have checked out his Singularity University. Kurzweil speculates on a not-so-distant moment in time when the growing rate of technological change transitions from its already step slope to vertical status, representing infinite change, and therefore defines a singularity (i.e., a single point when you look downwards).

A natural (sic) consequence of this event, or the time leading up to it, is (speculated) that we'll start replacing our squishier organic body components with more advanced functional equivalents. The motivation will come from the reality that computers will far exceed our brains in computing power in many ways, leaving us with a sink or swim scenario. Moving to this "post-biological" phase will be necessary in order to keep up with this next order of knowledge and simultaneously benefit from it.

So, as a spectator, the most fascinating part of this is how people might react to this pending reality. People will understandably picture Terminator robots. That's inevitable and unfortunate.

But it ain't going to be that way. Take a look at what's happening with nanotechnology. It's not about making tiny machines out of metal (that look like robots). It's about reformulating configurations of elements, for instance, carbon into bucky balls, nanotubes or ultra thin sheets called graphene that, by their physical characteristics, do amazing, highly focused functions such as sniffing out toxic elements in the air. Nanotechnology will be the foundation of better hearts, better brains, better motor skills, better senses...

So aside from just dealing with good old change, I don't really think there's as much to fear about the guttural reactions I'm seeing when the public is confronted with this amazing and, understandably, disconcerting topic.

After all, what's really happening here is that we're taking knowledge we acquire from a point in time ten to twenty years in our past and apply it to completely new projections twenty to thirty years in the future. Not a problem 100 years ago when the rate of change in a few decades was so small from the perspective of the average guy and gal. Big problem when the data you're just getting comfortable is out-data and just plain wrong. When the rate of change becomes more asymtopic, the knowledge we are just getting to be comfortable with, like cell phones and GPS, prepares us even less for the new stuff around the corner. It's basically that feeling you get at the Boardwalk when you're slowly approaching the apex of that first Roller-coaster peak and...

Check out the arguments at: http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=390vckvrxu

Mrs. Michaels -- Teacher with True Passion

Back in the 60's, Mrs. Michaels was my 7th grade English teacher at Collins Jr. High in Cupertino. Why I love to write is because of her.

Monday through thursday we'd walk into class and find a handful of words on the blackboard. They were usually words few of us knew. After looking them up, we then had 10 minutes to write a one page story, position paper or what-have-you incorporating those blackboard words.

In a month or so, we all got pretty good at the routine. (I've neglected to mention that all of this had to be done in the first 15 minutes of the class.) As much as I started enjoying it, I got mostly B's and couldn't understand why. But then I saw a pattern... the more I took a stand or got philosophical in my one pager, the better the grade. The visible effort of "thinking" was rewarded on a regular basis.

Oh yeah... about fridays. On fridays we'd group up as teams of 5 to do competitive crossword puzzles. Dictionary, thesaurus in hand, we applied what was steadily growing in all of us. True excitement about the English language and how to harness it.

Thank you Mrs. Michaels. I wish you were here to help save the world.

Empathy, Twitter and World Peace -- imagine that...

I've always believed that communication... especially the kind where you can't turn back once you've become dependent on it, would be the end of the Soviet Union. To compete with the rest of the world, I figured they'd have to go somewhere as a nation where their governance would be like a fish out of water... and therefore they'd most likely implode.

The more communication I see the better I like it... you just need to be willing to take the bad with the good. The narcissism is pretty bad right now because we're really ailing as a race that is recognizing that we're on the brink of some potentially scary stuff. So at least we're getting chatty and my prayer (or daily mantra) is that a marvelous side effect will be this world-rounded group hug that people eventually don't want to let go of... the "empathetic embrace" mentioned in the video.

This video by Jeremy Rifkin points out that there's good evidence that empathy is the evolving part of our brain's core competency. There's an incredibly exciting upside to that...