A Niche in the Library of Babel

One of the pleasures of my field is to find a technical paper written in the driest passive-voice-only larded-with-acronyms style on a subject that is astonishingly, gruesomely science-fictional.  Last month’s issue of the Journal of Solid State Circuits had such a paper:  “A Pulsed UWB Receiver SoC for Insect Motion Control” by D. Daly et al of MIT, U. Arizona, and U. Washington.   In brief, they have designed a chip that is small enough and light enough that it can be wired onto the back of a moth to turn it into a cyborgized spy or weapon.  The chip receives radio commands and drives tiny wires that are plugged into the moth’s wing muscles:

Insects don’t just look like machines any more

The block labeled Rx SoC (that’s Receiver System-on-a-Chip) is the subject of the paper.   The “Tungsten Stimulator” is the wires that go into the moth’s muscles,  the “DC-DC” block turns the voltage from the battery into a suitable voltage for the chip, the triangle is the radio antenna, the  “uCont. & Flash” is a micro-controller chip with flash memory storage of program parameters,  and the little rectangle is a crystal that supplies a clock frequency.

The thrust of the paper is how they were able to build a radio of such low power and high bandwidth that it’s able to run off of a battery small enough to be carried by a moth.  The whole system only weighs 1.0 grams, but this species of hawkmoth only weighs 2.5 grams, and it was apparently a real challenge just to attach the thing.  The receiver can run at up to 16 Mbits/sec, which is a decent rate for a laptop WiFi connection, but only draws a few milliwatts, the kind of power a watch battery can put out.

Yes, you ask, but why?   The answer can only be a bone-chilling laugh.  Well, that and it’s getting DARPA funding.  And it uses an interesting new modulation technique called ultra-wideband (UWB) which is much easier to integrate onto a chip than other kinds of radio.   That means that small, low-power radios can be built much more cheaply and therefore used in a much wider range of applications than the expensive multi-component types now found in cellphones.

OK, you say, speaking more slowly and distinctly, but why do they want to put remote controls on insects?   Beats me.  Here’s all they say about it:

“Scientists and engineers have been fascinated by cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, that fuse artificial and natural systems. Cyborgs enable harnessing biological systems that have been honed by evolutionary forces over millennia.  An emerging cyborg application is hybrid-insect flight control, where electronics and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices are placed on and within insects to alter flight direction. Compared to existing micro- and nano-airvehicles used by the military and other government agencies, insects are appealing because they are small, can travel significant distances, and can carry relatively large payloads. Such a hybrid-insect system would take the best qualities of biology: energy storage, efficient flight control, highly adapted sensing—and combine them with the best qualitiesof electronics: low weight, small size, deterministic control, and interfacing with computation.

Well that’s phrased carefully.   One is free to imagine anything:  moths doing suicide runs on enemy light bulbs, moths dropping anthrax into terrorist soup,  or crowds of moths clogging tank barrels.   Once manufacturing scales up, you could have  vast clouds of radio-controlled locusts devouring an enemy’s crops.  Once you can put a transmitter on the chip as well as a receiver, you could use it as an, ahem, bug.

Sorry.  The real reason, of course, is that the only way to get research money out of Republicans is to claim that it has some military application.  Cheap, low-power radios would be a great thing to have all by itself, and if the only way to get Uncle Sam to cough up is to pair it with some men-who-stare-at-goats class of project, then so be it.

Update 2/9/2010: The MIT professor who did this study, Anantha Chandrakasan, happens to be at a conference I’m attending.  I asked him why DARPA wanted to control insects and his answer was “That’s above my pay grade.”  He was interested in the radio design, and a grad student got a nice thesis out of it.  The biology part was someone else’s responsibility.

Update 6/26/2017: The above professor has just been made Dean of Engineering at MIT!  He has done a lot of great work on chips, so this is well-deserved, but maybe some three-letter agency interested in cyborg insects also likes him.

Yes, it’s cheap, yes it’s obvious, and yes it’s meaningless, but I can’t resist noting that today’s date, 01/11/10, is both binary and a palindrome, at least when written in the North American, non-Y2K-compliant style.    The next one is Nov 11, 2011, and that’s it for this century!

So here’s an interesting idea – making the gas pedal push back when you get too close to the car in front or should shift for fuel economy:

Active Pedal from Continental AG

Full description here at Green Car Advisor.  They claim that when people can feel when it’s best to shift, they can improve mileage by 5 to 10%.

Even a small improvement like that easily justifies the extra cost of an active pedal. Say that this is an optimized diesel that gets 40 mpg and gets driven for 120K miles before getting junked. It’ll burn 3000 gallons of gas during its life. At $3 a gallon that’s $9000. A 5% saving is $450. If the car maker has a 50% margin on features (which is what everybody slaps on to their products), then they would buy the pedal for $225. For that much you can put an Atom processor and a camera into the thing.

I’ve driven cars with little lights that blink at the shift point, and they are pretty annoying.   Anything that flashes forces you to take your eyes off the road, and when it’s a flash that you intend to ignore anyway, it’s not long before you break out the black tape.  I could see that a tactile feedback loop like this could soon become unconscious, leaving you free to be irked by the news on the radio.

I wonder if something like this could be done with the steering wheel too.   That might be better for a lane departure warning than a buzzer.   You could even simulate  road feel while still having an active suspension.   You could feel what the road is like without actually getting bounced all over.    It’d be nice if cars just nudged you instead of beeping or flashing.

Another storm, another clearing of the driveway.  I don’t mind it all that much, at least this early in the season, since snow brightens everything.    It’d be entirely fine if you didn’t have to drive on filthy slush.   I’ve seen Russian kids going to school on snowy paths with 18″ skis strapped to their boots, and envied them.

But the trouble with shoveling is that every time an inch of snow falls it has to be lifted above the N inches that are already there.   Shoveling gets harder and harder as the piles accumulate.  I remember that the Blizzard of ’78 was particularly bad because there had already been a 22″ snowfall a few days before, so when another 26″ fell there was no place to put the stuff.

In computer science terms this would be called an O (N^2) problem, because the work increases as the square of N, not just as N.  It’s like sorting a list by comparing every element to every other element – as the size N of the list increases, the time increases as N^2.

So what to do?  There are a couple of approaches:

• O (1) – Do nothing.  Wait for it to melt.  The Washington DC approach.
• O (N) – Do the same thing no matter how much snow there is.  This is the snow blower principle – just throw it all up high enough and it’ll get over whatever piles are already there.
• O (N log N) – As the piles get higher, make them wider.  That is, move the snow farther away from where you’re shoveling.  This is the principle of the mighty Wovel, which my brother gave me for Christmas one year:
• 

  Wovel in action, though not by me

  You push down on it to raise the shovel, and then jerk it back to add to a pile.  The nice thing is that you can transport the snow easily to a new pile when one gets too tall.   It can’t lift things more than about two feet, though, which isn’t all that high.

• O (N^2) – Get depressed as winter proceeds.

As you can tell, my mind wanders when I’m doing this.

So I was planting tulip bulbs a few weeks ago when it occurred to me – this is the first time in weeks that I’ve touched something not man-made.  Almost everything in our day-to-day environs is an artifact.  Our clothes – woven from some fiber.  Our tools – stamped or cast from metal or plastic.    Our food – bred to meet our needs.  A carrot is as much made as a hammer.   Seafood is an exception, but less and less of that is caught in the wild.   Dogs are pretty much an artifact; cats are less so.  Furniture, cars, books – even our water is purified before we touch it.

In gardening you touch actual dirt, made by plants and eathworms and microbes.   Dirt is why everything else in our lives is man-made – actual nature is unhealthy.   Plants and animals really don’t want to be touched.  They’ll discourage it with thorns and teeth.  The bacteria that do want to get into us are doing so for reasons we don’t encourage.  We like our surfaces to be sterile and dead instead of alive and infectious.

This isn’t a particularly modern condition.  People have worn shoes and used hoes for a long time.  Humanity has been steadily separating itself from direct contact with the natural world for millenia.   You live longer that way.   It may seem limiting and sheltered to be wrapping ourselves in a cocoon of our own stuff, but it’s protective too.