Ben Popper

You are currently browsing articles tagged Ben Popper.

“That Battery Can Reportedly Power The Average Home For A Week when fully charged”

February 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Unintended consequences aren’t necessarily a bad thing. The new batteries manufactured for EVs are beginning to be repurposed to power homes. If a good deal of that electricity can be created from solar, a major correction to environmental damage could be in the offing. From Ben Popper at the Verge:

Tesla didn’t ship nearly as many cars this quarter as it had projected, but CEO Elon Musk remained upbeat during today’s earnings call as he let some details slip about a brand new product. According to Musk, the company is working on a consumer battery pack for the home. Design of the battery is apparently complete, and production could begin in six months. Tesla is still deciding on a date for unveiling the new unit, but Musk said he was pleased with the result, calling the pack “really great” and voicing his excitement for the project.

What would a Tesla home battery look like? The Toyota Mirai, which uses a hydrogen fuel cell, gives owners the option to remove the battery and use it to supply electrical power to their homes. That battery can reportedly power the average home for a week when fully charged. Employees at many big Silicon Valley tech companies already enjoy free charging stations at their office parking lot. Now imagine if they could use that juice to eliminate their home electric bill.•

Tags: ,

“Google Introduced Calico To The World With The Bold Ambition Of ‘Curing Death'”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google’s stated goal in 2013 of “curing death” appeared to be little more than a questionable cover idea for Time, and the more-reasonable target of its life-extension offshoot, Calico, seems clearer a year later: It’s the search giant’s entry into Big Pharma. The drugs the company brings to market to treat geriatric diseases will likely aim more for incremental improvements than silver-bullet solutions. Immortality, at best, is a long, hard slog. From Ben Popper at the Verge, an analysis of Calico’s new development deal with pharmaceutical heavyweight AbbVie:

“Remember, Google introduced Calico to the world with the bold ambition of ‘curing death.’ CEO Larry Page, Google Ventures head honcho Bill Maris, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who Google hired as its director of engineering, have all expressed a deep interest in radical life extension and the Singularity. Up until today we haven’t had a lot of detail about how Calico would pursue that goal. Page had told Time, ‘One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.’

Viewed in that light this new drug-development partnership, while ambitious and admirable, is decidedly less futuristic than what Google had previously been suggesting it would pursue.”

Tags:

“These Machines Are Going To Listen To Everything You Say”

October 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“We are going to be living in a world with tablets or flat screen computers on the walls in our bedrooms and kitchens.” (Image by Vergel Bradford.)

Let’s hope there’s an OFF switch when we are surrounded by screens and sensors that want to assist us without any prompting. It will be wonderful and it will be terrible. From Ben Popper at the Verge:

It’s rare to meet a startup that is focused on building a business for a world which does not yet exist. But Expect Labs, which today announced a $2.4 million round of funding from Google Ventures and Greylock Partners, is doing just that. The company is creating a system that listens and understands human conversation, then suggests relevant information without being prompted. ‘As the price of hardware falls, we are going to be living in a world with tablets or flat screen computers on the walls in our bedrooms and kitchens,’ says Expect Labs founder Timothy Tuttle. ‘These machines are going to listen to everything you say and be able to assist you with the right song, map or recipe, without you even having to ask.'”

Tags: ,

“Only By Augmenting Our Physiology With Drugs And Machines Could We Thrive In Extraterrestrial Environs”

August 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Ben Popper’s new Verge consideration of the queasy topic of bio-hacking and the advent of the real-life cyborg:

“In one sense, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, part man, part machine, animated by electricity and with superhuman abilities, might be the first dark, early vision of what humans bodies would become when modern science was brought to bear. A more utopian version was put forward in 1960, a year before man first travelled into space, by the scientist and inventor Manfred Clynes. Clynes was considering the problem of how mankind would survive in our new lives as outer space dwellers, and concluded that only by augmenting our physiology with drugs and machines could we thrive in extraterrestrial environs. It was Clynes and his co-author Nathan Kline, writing on this subject, who coined the term cyborg.

At its simplest, a cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts: metal, electrical, mechanical, or robotic. The construct is familiar to almost everyone through popular culture, perhaps most spectacularly in the recent Iron Man films. Tony Stark is surely our greatest contemporary cyborg: a billionaire businessman who designed his own mechanical heart, a dapper bachelor who can transform into a one man fighter jet, then shed his armour as easily as a suit of clothes.

Britain is the birthplace of 21st century biohacking, and the movement’s two foundational figures present a similar Jekyll and Hyde duality. One is Lepht Anonym, a DIY punk who was one of the earliest, and certainly the most dramatic, to throw caution to the wind and implant metal and machines into her flesh. The other is Kevin Warwick, an academic at the University of Reading department of cybernetics. Warwick relies on a trained staff of medical technicians when doing his implants. Lepht has been known to say that all she requires is a potato peeler and a bottle of vodka.”

Tags: , , ,