Glucose Fuel Cells

One of the big problems science fiction (to say nothing of actual medical science) has had a problem with is how do you power all these cool cybernetic gismos you, the author, want to put in someone's body. Going back to the Six Million Dollar Man (and Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels upon which the series was based), the most common power source seems to be nuclear, robably Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators. They certainly have the longevity for the job, with endurances measured in decades. Indeed, these devices were used in pacemakers in years past, and according to the Wikipedia article, some ninety of these are still in service.

Realistically, though, equipping j random cyborg with plutonium pellets seems problematic on a number of levels.

This is a problem I've wrestled with before, and my solution, as it appeared in a brief mention in Irreconcilable Differences was the glucose fuel cell. I reasoned, positing it, that since fuel cells can extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon fuels such as alcohol or gasoline, it seemed reasonable they could extract it from carbohydrates like glucose, which the body conveniently supplies from food energy. As long as one didn't get carried away with them and exceed the fuel supply the body could deliver, it seemed like a nice solution.

Using these gadgets gave my cyborgs a different feel from the brute force cybernetics of yesteryear. It meant that they were predominantly meat with hormonal implants and small, low power cybernetics.

It also appears to be practical. Via Singularity Hub, comes the news that scientists in France have not only built such a thing, but implanted them in rats and had them function. The scientific paper is here.

Interestingly, the paper also discusses using urea as one of the fuels, though not with this particular fuel cell. If practical, such a fuel cell would be even better, as it would use metabolic waste as its fuel. This, by contrast, had not occurred to me, and it's a great addition. The body can afford to be far more generous with its waste products than its primary fuel chemistry.

The future just keeps arriving, doesn't it? :)

-JRS

Technorati Tags: Irreconcilable Differences, technology

Heh

XKCD - Looking Glass felt a lot like this during the writing process. :)

-JRS

A moment of silence for Frank Frazetta

A moment of silence for Frank Frazetta, master of the chain mail bikini, illustrator of fantasy book covers, comic books, and heavy metal albums. He was 82.

I first encountered his art work in an art book belonging to my mother, and in posters she purchased, laminated, and used in the art classes she taught to grade schoolers.

-JRS

Ebook toolsets for mac

Spent a lot of time today tweaking my ebook tools.

First, there's a new version of epubcheck here. It caught some minor errors in my most recent epub books - Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences, which appear to make some small difference rendering my HTML/CSS in epubs.

Second, also for the epub world, Adobe Digital Editions seems to have a less flakey version out for mac, although their flash installer fails, as one might expect. You can download the standalone installer here.

Second-and-a-Half, in a nice also-ran, is the Barnes and Noble eReader. It does a tolerable job of rendering ePubs, though it still ignores more of my CSS than Adobe's offering. The user interface is /much/ nicer, though a bit idiosyncratic, than Digital Editions. The thing does crash fairly reliably if you feed it two different versions of the same book, so it's problematic for ebook testing in my case. It's available here.

Third, and long, long overdue, Amazon has released a version of the product formerly known as mobigen now known as Kindlegen that is native for mac. If you didn't know, I've been running mobigen for PC in Wine's occasionally flakey emulation since I got my kindle. Now I have a native executable that runs in MacOS X. Much faster, much less flakey, and I don't have to wait for x-windows to start up. Otherwise it appears more or less the same. You can get Kindlegen here.

Fourth, also courtesy of Amazon, OS X finally has a decent mobipocket reader that runs natively in the form of Kindle for Mac. Another tool I've had to use in Emulation, and the only reason I have been maintaining a Windows 7 beta installation in Parallells, so I could verify that my mobipocket files actually worked on anything besides an actual Kindle, which also have. You can get Kindle for Mac here.

I'm not sure what to make of the spate of new tools for Mac. It's easy to say B&N and Amazon are afraid their book readers will be swept away by iPad, so rather than continue to disenfranchise Mac users (in Amazon's case) they finally decided to support Mac. I don't actually know, and I don't care that much. I have a Kindle and I use it when I travel. I have an iPod touch that I use constantly. Both can read my kindle library, as can my desktop. Theoretically (though I haven't tried it on Kindle) both can read free epub books as well. From the standpoint of /making/ ebooks on my desktop, having these new tools is a godsend. Oh, and one other thing. They're all free (as in beer).

-JRS

Apple, iPad, and the education market

One thing I think all the pundits miss when they either praise or condemn the forthcoming iPad is who its primary market is.

Consider. Apple has sold and continues to sell a huge number of laptops to the education market. I would not be surprised to discover that, in fact, this market is the one that continues to demand the white plastic shelled MacBook, which Apple has reduced to a single model at the low end of its laptop products.

Consider that one of the biggest costs of these programs is supporting the laptops. Laptops are fragile. Hinges break. Hard drives don't like large jolts. Power supplies get lost. Software gets deleted. The list goes on and on.

Now imagine you're an educator and Apple comes to you with a machine that is more robust, has fewer moving parts, lives in a walled garden of software that can be restricted further by the teachers.

IPad would be ideally suited as a textbook replacement. Unlike other ebook readers (cough kindle) it can display in color, and it can display fixed pages in PDF. Textbooks are a media consumption system, and that is what the iPad is designed for.

I suspect you will see Apple pushing them out to schools, and I would not be surprised if the white macbook, last scion of the old ibook that the schools loved so much, shuffles off in the next major product update.

Speculating wildly here. :)
-JRS

Technorati Tags: technology

Ebook Rebuilds again

The rebuilt version of Irreconcilable Differences in Mobipocket is up.

JRS

Ebook Rebuilds

Just a quick note. I've rebuilt both ebook versions of /Looking Glass/ and the epub version of /Irreconcilable Differences/ so that ebook software with limited memory won't gag on them anymore. I'll get the new version of /Irreconcilable Differences/ in mobipocket out probably on Monday.

-JRS