Rambodoc at large

While the world waits endlessly for the iPhone launch, let us give some space to the nay-sayers. Here are 11 reasons not to buy an iPhone.
Ok, job over, fairness be damned, let us now drool over the phenomenal vibes coming off from experts on the gadget. David Pogue has answered some FAQs on the device.
You know how interested in the iPhone I am, as I have posted before.



Craze for the device is just as Apple must have planned it. People have been queueing outside Apple stores for four days now, and sleeping on the pavement, 'bathing' in the faucets in the Apple store bathrooms, and hoping for some food given by benevolent New Yorkers. I think those who manage to buy it today will be the ones who will flaunt it for some time, because stocks are going to run out.
As with all Apple products, I think a little wait will give buyers a better and trouble-free product, as the initial problems will have got sorted out by that time.
At least, as one resigned to waiting in India for an year at the least, this is what is consolation for the Apple-crazy fan.

Scientists have implanted computer chips in a pupa within a cocoon, leading to the creation of an intelligent moth that can be remote controlled. Stretching the imagination a bit, one can visualise these moths , fitted with cool, hi-res video cameras that transmit images wirelessly to the CIA, as spying on terrorist groups. This is yet another brainy project of DARPA, the US Army Division that plans research for the future. It may be worth remembering that DARPA is credited for the creation of the internet! For the full article on the cyborg moth, click here.
I have, in my article 'The Science of Bioterror', mentioned how the counterterror gurus have devised similar remote-controlled bees that are capable of detecting biological agents of terrorism, like anthrax, for example. I have been privileged to interact personally with Rick Satava, an authority on Disruptive Medicine, about which I have written previously.
While it remains to be seen how the fast evolving terrorists react to future technologies, we are likely to see commercially available advanced, miniature spying devices that will be used to violate individual privacy. I cannot but quote Peter Valery here: “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”

Want to use an iPhone right away, even though you don't have half a chance in hell to get hold of one this year? Get iContact, a free software that lets you use your Windows phone like an iPhone.
I read about this software in one of my fave sites, Lifehacker.
If you read the comments, you would go for it. I use an ornery old phone, so I'll pass!

So, Monday night in the US now, but it is daybreak here in India, and it is raining news from the WWDC (Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference) at downtown San Francisco. Check out the headlines here.
The new Mac OS Leopard will be launched in October this year. iPhone will accept third party developers. Great! Now all we need to hear is that the other phone carriers, apart from AT&T will also be able to serve iPhone customers! For a live ball-to-ball ring-side view of Steve Jobs' presentation, check out this Engadget-enabled site.
And, of course, keep tuned in for more!

Here is another provocative iPhone ad.
The limited functionality of the web browsers of the shamefully hung-up and expensive Nokia phones would make any sane, normally demented adult man drool more than he usually does on his piillow at the sight of this kind of functionality of a cell phone device.

How seriously crazy are you for the iPhone? The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has put up a list of the price people are willing to pay for the iPhone. I'll pass on most of these, thanks!

But if it is a minor issue of a princes' ransom, I am hoping, some day, to be queueing up for what promises to be the ultimate boy-toy of the year!

As we enter the month of June, the rumors and gossips centered around Apple's iPhone launch are heating up. Enjoy reading this NY Times article on this. You may as well check out the official iPhone video ads. So, come June 29th, are we going to see the next revolution? Or are we, finally, after discovering that fingers don't really give you as much fun touching screens as other things, going to feel disappointed?

This article came out today in KnowHow, The Telegraph. This article is a pretty basic outline of the Mac, which is largely unknown in the Indian market.

Are you one of those guys on the lookout for a hot piece to play on your lap, or as you are lazing in bed? Unlike what you are looking for, a less loaded question should be: looking for a new laptop?
Oh, you have heard of a Mac, but don’t really know much about it, right? One has heard of compatibility problems, so why bother, right, guru?
All over the world, the Mac has a cult following that swears by it, and that fiercely fights the vast ‘Win-doze’ majority. Over the years, the Apple product has increased its customer base greatly, not least because of the iPod revolution brought in by Steve Jobs, the iconic Apple founder. However, Microsoft is no electronic rabbit, and has launched a new operating system called Vista, though people say it merely highlights how good the Mac operating system (OS in short), the Tiger, has been for years.


What are you looking for in your quest for a precious laptop? Of course, a bulk of you will have got a Windows-based PC manufactured by Dell, Toshiba, Compaq or Sony from your company as a corporate, electronic dog collar. For those of you who can decide for yourself, here is a shameless, though altruistic, pitch for the Mac.
Let us first get over the basic issue of why I say ‘Get a Mac’:
* No crashes: the Unix-based OS in the Mac is rock-steady. It just keeps working on and on.
* No viruses: too good to believe, unless you try it. Windows folks deal with 114,000 of them bugs!
* Esthetics: so stylish that every movie (Swades comes to mind) that shows a notebook shows the classic bitten apple glowing from the back of the bezel. It looks too cool to resist!
* Awesome multimedia experience: take it from an absolute e-diot, in those days when I was using a PC, I couldn’t ever edit any surgical video: it was too complex for me, and so I spent thousands of rupees to get a pro to edit a surgery, ruining Sundays, before I could make it presentable in a conference. You know, with an eight minute deadline for a video presentation of an operation that may have lasted four hours, one needs to be up there near Bill Gates to do the job. Or so I thought. Till I bought a Mac. My multimedia gurus kept calling me for business, but no, thanks, dada! I had become a multimedia guru myself, with the intuitive editing and DVD making system in iMovie, the Mac program for this purpose. This is one of the programs constituting the iLife suite of applications that make for the definitive multimedia experience of the Mac.
iLife consists of apps like iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb, etc., that seamlessly integrate to allow you to do things that much easily. Everything in a Mac seems to be just a drag-and-drop away. Once you try the experience, even the Vista seems far away.
* One more plug for the multimedia edge of the Mac: you never seem to need to install or configure any driver. For example, plug in your Cybershot or your Casio digital camera or whatever you have, and iPhoto will take up your pics instantly, without you having to dig out the CD that came in the box of your camera to install.
* With a high-res screen, an in-built iSight web camera and a user-friendly interface, the Mac is easy, one-click stuff for those of you keen on making your own websites, blogs, and video-chatting.
* Know an iPod? Know iTunes?? You know how a Mac works, then! Simple.
Okay, so what exactly do Windows folk do better? The answer is: belong to the majority, the herd, and suffer in common with the virus-ridden world. The PC also integrates better in the corporate world. Additionally, the price of a Windows-based notebook may be cheaper than a MacBook.
The Mac is presently running on an OS called the Tiger. Come June, the newer version, called the Leopard, will be ready for launch. Vista, popularly called a Tiger ‘me-too’ product, will look more aged with the launch of the Leopard, if history is to be believed.

As a no-maintenance, no-hang, no-jhamela system, the Mac is a sure winner. The only bitch is that it is slightly heavy on the pocket. After all, as Mac-addicts joke, it is all for a good cause: the Steve Jobs Benevolent Fund! However, if you look at the good PC laptops, like the Sony Vaio, the costs range from less than a lakh to two lakhs!
Oh, and no, the compatibility issues are no longer relevant, with a wide variety of open source software that allows you to use PC applications. I think the most common Windows application that is universally used is the MS Office. Well, the Mac can do MS Office. Word doc, Excel file, PowerPoint presentation (though if you try Keynote, you will puke at the thought of PowerPoint), the Mac does it all.
The MacBook comes in two basic forms. The newer one is called the MacBook Pro, which is the higher end version. The older one, which I have happily used for a few years, is the MacBook. The basic model (Intel Core-Two Duo processor with more than 2 GHz processor speed, a 200GB hard disc, and up to 2 GB RAM) memory, costs around 60 to 80 big ones (INR), while the MacBook Pro, loaded even heavier, costs between Rs. 118,000 to 163,000 a piece. Of course you get all the bells and whistles, including Wi-Fi 802.11n connectivity, Bluetooth, etc., allowing you to join open wireless networks in coffee shops, hotels and airports without any hassles. The MagSafe power cord adaptor is a typically cool-drool Apple brainwave: the power cord connects to the laptop magnetically, and gets pulled off automatically if you trip over it by chance, saving your machine from crashing down. Simple and awesome. With a standard 8x double-layer burning Super-Drive, it burns DVDs faster than previous models. As they say, the bang-to-buck ratio is higher in a Mac.
As far as the OS is concerned, if you are still the hidebound conservative sort, you can use Windows (XP or Vista) parallel with the native Tiger OS X.
Don’t jump the gun, though, because I expect new Mac notebooks to be launched this June. For all you know, this may come armed with things like touch screens and other irresistible stuff other companies can only dream about. Your new computing experience is set to be quite im-Mac-ulate!

Check out my review of the Playstation3 in Kolkata's The Telegraph

It’s prettier than ever before. It works, arguably, better than ever before. The new Windows Media Player 11, initially introduced as a beta version, is now finally out.
Microsoft, the world’s largest maker of computers, has recently launched WMP 11, a media player that will be part of the new Vista operating system to be out early next year.
The new version is available free of cost only for Windows XP users, so that Mac users have to cool their heels to test this one. When Vista will be launched, the software is going to be a free add-on in the package, like the just-released Internet Explorer 7.
With this new offering, Microsoft seems to have woken up to the needs of its users. The player looks cool and modern. Its user interface (UI in geek-speak) is far better, and it has easy to use buttons that allow you to rip CDs in a hurry and to integrate with portable devices including the Xbox.
WMP 11 boasts of seamless integration with URGE, the digital music store from MTV, which gives you a choice to pick up songs from a bank of millions of titles. Of course, there are plenty of people who will tell you that URGE is the world’s worst collection of online music!
WMP 11 comes with enhanced search capabilities. You can easily scroll and search for music real quick, even if your library contains thousands of songs. Instant Search is the remarkable new feature in 11, with each keystroke narrowing the search results, whether in your own library or in URGE. Mac users are no strangers to these features, with the amazingly powerful Spotlight taking pride of place in OS X, the Tiger.
You can drag-and-drop songs to create playlists, and store these in your MP3 player (surely you don’t use an iPod, do you?). Though Microsoft has a relationship with the MP3 player made by iRiver, it is developing its own iPod killer called Zune. As users know, the world’s largest selling player is the Pod, which needs the iTunes media player installed in your PC.
Back to the 11. It allows you to shuffle songs, navigate easily, and shows you music, photos, and videos by categories. As a user, you can also benefit from the huge network of portable devices that integrate with Microsoft’s products all over the world. Furthermore, in addition to URGE, hundreds of online music and video services and radio stations worldwide are designed to work with Windows Media Player 11.
The player has new formats for ripping and music playback, including Windows Media Audio Professional and WAV Lossless.
Oh, and before one forgets, album art is available, though it may not work if your stars are unlucky! Check out this poser from a user:
“WMP11 Beta made a mess of my album art... turning all my “folder. jpg” images into hidden files that could not be seen, searched, or unhidden.”
In spite of its in-your-face chic, WMP 11 suffers from some incredible flaws. It does not support podcasts. Can you imagine that, in this day and age? They are still going with radio stations. In addition, installation in your PC may be a pretty painful event, if one goes by the many moans resounding in Microsoft’s own discussion lists. Many users have complained about the version 10 working fine, and the comp hanging after installation of version 11. No answers yet from the company’s gurus.
Overall, the new player is like you: cool, savvy and modern.
In fact, it is remarkable how close WMP 11 is coming to iTunes, the slick media player of the Mac.
If imitation is flattery, Microsoft is saying the best things about Apple’s Tiger. Whether you are a Mac addict or a devoted Windows worshipper, you stand to gain from the unending competition between two great companies!

Remember Thomas Edison? Wrongly thought to be the inventor of the electric lamp, but actually the creator of the electric grid? Or Graham Bell, who rang in the first telephone? These men created products that changed civilisation. These, amongst some others, were disruptive technologies: technologies so outrageous that they are considered daring, provocative, and extraordinary. Today, we are on the threshold of possibilities so outlandish that science fiction sounds pretty ho-hum.
Nothing exemplifies this as fundamentally as the field of ‘disruptive’ medicine and, arguably, nobody in the field of medicine understands the future of this ‘outrageous’ medicine as well as Richard Satava. ‘Rick’ Satava is a Professor of Surgery at Washington University Medical Center, Seattle and has written several books and articles on futuristic ‘disruptive’ medicine. Apart from being a surgeon of world repute, Satava was part of the team that developed the first robotic and Virtual Reality systems, before joining DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency), the brain bank of the US military. He is soon to take over as the Chief Scientist of theUS Army Medical Research and Command. It is here that he will be funding and overseeing more outrageous medical research. So, what earth shaking developments are afoot in the world of medicine?

A NEW AGE

Satava starts off, “A glimpse of what the future might become was given by Alvin Toffler in his 1976 book ‘The Third Wave’, in which he described the three different ‘ages’ – the Agriculture Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age. There appears to be a new age emerging – tentatively called the Biointelligence Age.” But one thought the Information Age is the future? He says, “The Information Era is here and is getting over. Over the past 20 years, there have been no new discoveries. The cell phone, computer, etc. are fundamentally the same as they were 20-30 years ago, the only difference being their level of sophistication and add-on features like small size, Internet access, cameras, etc."
The Biointelligence age features a slew of radical technologies that are set to change the entire way of treating health and disease issues. We examine some of the main issues here.

THE IMPOSSIBLE FUSION OF LIFE AND MACHINE

Scientists have implanted sensors and radio transmitters in bees and cockroaches to control them. The cockroach can be controlled with a joystick, allowing a possibility for cameras to be implanted in the creature for use in the detection of earthquakes and tsunamis. Bees fitted with sensors for biological weapons can transmit the information to the military. This is the beginning of the man-made fusion of living and non-living.
In man, brain implants are promising enormous hope for patients of paralysis, epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. John Donoghue, a neuroscientist who also owns a biotech company called Cyberkinetics in California has begun implanting the Braingate device in the heads of patients that allow them to mechanically move an attached robotic arm with the power of electrical impulses generated by thought. The brain’s electrical impulses generated from thinking of an action go to a robot that then interprets these signals and performs an appropriate action.
How realistic is it to expect intelligent machines to perform radical functions in place of diseased body parts? Says Ray Kurtzweil, a global authority on science and future technology, “The latest generation of the implant for Parkinson’s disease (a slowly paralysing nerve disorder) is not an experiment, and it is an FDA approved therapy”. Rameez Naam says in his book ‘More Than Human’, “In Lisbon, Portugal, there is a group of blind men and women who can now see. In place of eyeglasses, they wear cameras connected to electrodes implanted in the visual parts of their brains. Some of them were blind for twenty years or more before the surgery. The same research that gives them sight could beam images from one person’s mind into another. “
Aubrey de Grey, a world-renowned scientist at the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, says, “There are non-biological organs such as cochlear implants already, and rapid progress is being made on more advanced things like artificial hearts. What will be more dramatic is when we start to be able to make machines that can replace some parts of the brain. For well-understood parts like the hippocampus (the part of the brain that stores memory), this may be only a couple of decades away. At that time we may wonder if ‘non-living’ is really the right word - non-biological, yes, but performing a living, cognitive function.”
de Grey looks even farther: “If we end up being able to replace the hippocampus with a machine that works just as well, there's no reason why we couldn't replace it with something that does more than the natural one. One additional function could be to use it as a knowledge base, an inbuilt Internet. In the more distant future we will probably understand the cerebral cortex well enough to start replacing parts of it too, and that is possible.”



CHANGING LIFE’S BUILDING BLOCKS

Conventional medicine looks at organ systems and deals with disease at the macro level. The dizzyingly fast developments in nanotechnology and genetic engineering are set to make this obsolete, if experts are to be believed.
Nanotechnology deals with molecules at the scale of a few nanometers, and banks heavily on the creation of an atomic ‘assembler device’ or molecular machine: a concept of scientist Eric Drexler that pertains to a group of molecules arranged to perform the functions of a machine or even a computer. Says Kurtzweil, “The golden era will be in about twenty years from now. The real Holy Grail of nanotechnology are nanobots, blood cell-size devices that can go inside the body and keep us healthy from inside.” Molecular machines can clear out clots in arteries, go into cells and correct abnormalities, and kill germs or cancer. Kurtzweil reiterates, “If that sounds very futuristic, let me point out that we’re doing sophisticated tasks already with blood cell-size devices in animal experiments.
One scientist cured Type 1 diabetes in rats with a nano-engineered capsule that has seven nanometer pores. It lets insulin out in a controlled fashion and blocks insulin antibodies. This is what is feasible today. MIT has a project of a sub-cellular nano-engineered device that is capable of detecting specifically the antigens that exist only on certain types of cancer cells. When it detects these antigens, it latches onto the cell, and burrows inside the cell, where it releases a toxin that destroys the cancer cell. This is a sophisticated nano-engineered device in that it is created at the molecular level. So that’s what is feasible already.”

CHANGING GENES OR SPECIES?

The era of transgenic animals is upon us already. Michael Crichton’s latest book 'Next’ deals with apes that speak Dutch and French, because of experiments in crossbreeding with humans.
Genetic engineering can prevent inherited disorders, but more radical is transgenic genetic engineering. Satava cites the example of rhodopsins (color detecting eye pigments). Man has four rhodopsins for vision of which he uses only two. The pit viper snake has one of the same rhodopsins that is unused by humans, and which gives the snake the ability to seek its prey in infrared. He asks, “ Should we genetically engineer our children to give them such abilities, so they can see in the dark? Should they have abilities that others do not have, giving them an enormous advantage? Moreover, who will decide which children can be ‘enhanced’? Are we on a threshold of designing our children to a point where there will be a whole class of enhanced individuals?”
Troubling questions, these! The ethical issues of genetic engineering are being debated fiercely in scientific and political circles, with more questions than answers.
With the establishment of ‘intelligent’ prostheses that function even better than a normal body part (as in amputees who can climb mountains or play), and with all possible organs (except the brain) being replaceable with biosynthetic ones, it is possible to conceive of an ‘enhanced’ man with 95% of his body replaced by artificial ones. “Would such a man be ‘humanoid’ or human?” asks Satava.
Talking of humanoids, a parallel development has been the creation of intelligent robots that help impaired patients. Satava remarks, “Advanced programs such as fuzzy logic can help the robot or computer to learn from tasks. This meets the definition of ‘thinking’. There are machines with life-like robotic faces which can answer verbal questions and attempt to make facial expressions that show six specific emotions”. Robotics is expected to be a $50 billion industry by 2025, with countries like South Korea set to become leaders in domestic multifunctional robots (with a target of one domestic droid for every home by 2013). Companies like Microsoft are working on the same lines. With such research, a thinking and emoting robot is not going to be mere science fiction. It is already reality in research!

WILL MAN HIBERNATE AND REJUVENATE?

American scientists have new insights into the phenomenon of hibernation, with stunning implications for medical care. Animals like the Arctic ground squirrel can turn their entire system off, effectively living with minimal heart rate, breathing, and circulation, owing to a molecule that blocks energy generation in the hypothalamus of the brain. Scientists have been able to create a block in mice such that they are put into a state of suspended animation for about 6 hours – no respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, ECG, EEG, and even no activity on functional MRI of the brain. After 6 hours, they are awakened and they behave normally. Satava points out “while this is an early experiment, it points to the possibility of using these molecules or drugs for anesthesia. If successful, in surgery a patient could be put to ‘sleep’ with no heartbeat, no bleeding when incised (bloodless surgery), unaware of pain and unable to move. When the surgery is over, he can be awakened.”
Drexler confirms, “It is possible to discover a drug that causes biostasis (putting life in pause). A method of producing reversible biostasis could help astronauts on long space voyages to save food and avoid boredom. In medicine, biostasis would provide a deep anesthesia giving physicians more time to work. When emergencies occur far from medical help, a good biostasis procedure would provide a sort of universal first-aid treatment: it would stabilize a patient's condition and prevent molecular machines from running amok and damaging tissues. 

But no one has found a drug able to stop the entire metabolism the way anesthetics stop consciousness - that is, in a way that can be reversed by simply washing the drug out of the patient's tissues. Nonetheless, reversible biostasis will be possible when repair machines become available.”
With much research involving other areas like human cloning, prolonging longevity of man, and tissue synthesis modern science is helping evolve a new breed of professional: the scientific ethicist.