Iron Man 3: Extremis and Ray Baughman's Carbon Nanotubes

By now the general consensus is that the third Iron Man movie, due out May 2013 (is it too early to camp out for the midnight showing?) will cover, in some form, the Extremis storyline from the Iron Man comic book circa 2005. What was Extremis? Carbon nanotubes. An injection of special carbon nanotubes "rewrote" the brain's internal map of the human body. The person injected then went into a coma, formed a cocoon of scar tissue, and emerged 2 or 3 days later a super-enhanced, fire-breathing, hyper-aggressive killing machine. 

With Guy Pearce confirmed as Aldrich Killian, the inventor of Extremis, and Rebecca Hall as Dr. Maya Hansen - Extremis' co-creator, the plotline is fairly evident. In the Extremis storyline, the Mandarin plans to infect everyone on earth with the Extremis serum. Ben Kingsley is playing Mandarin in Iron Man 3...will we see a similar plot?

In any case, the point I wanted to make was that the Extremis storyline came out in 2005 and was based around carbon nanotubes, which at the time (was 2005 really that long ago...?) were still a nebulous, fantastic substance with unknown but seemingly magical and endless properties. The future belonged to carbon nanotubes! We'd be making superconductors out of it, bullet-proof clothing out of it, ultra-strong bridges out of it...people even speculated that it could be used in a space elevator ribbon. Ignorance vis-a-vis imagination.

I've written three or four times on here about the limiting factors of the Iron Man "highly advanced prosthetic": power supply, human machine interface, and artificial muscle.

And here's where the two arcs meet: Ray Baughman. Baughman is a researcher at the University of Texas in Dallas who has been turning seemingly useless (bear with me) carbon nanotubes into elaborate yarn. 

I've pointed to his research before. Now Baughman has apparently given up on his floating carbon nanotube aerogel sheets as an artificial muscle and is pursuing paraffin-wax impregnated carbon nanotube yarn. His latest research is promising. Apply heat (2,500 Celsius!) and the yarn contracts (technically it expands outward and by the law of conservation of matter the outward expansion causes a lengthwise contraction).

But you have to read these things carefully. Because there is always a catch. In the case of Baughman's nanotube yarn muscle, it is the contraction percentage that breaks the heart. By ramping the yarn up to 2,500 degrees Celsius he is only able to achieve a 7% contraction. By contrast, human muscle operates at a brisk 37 Celsius and contracts 30 - 40%. 

So the problem with the paraffin-impregnated nano-yarn is that you'd need a muscle five times as long in order to achieve human-analogue muscle contractions. Not to mention that you'd incinerate the human being using the artificial muscle just from the proximity to scorching substance.

Carbon nanotubes are really neat. There's still a lot to learn about them. Maybe Baughman will one day achieve the universally-sought goal of a reliable, cheap analogue to skeletal muscle. Maybe an injection of carbon nanotubes like Extremis will one day give us super-strength.

In the meantime, apparently they are toxic to aquatic creatures?

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Media Bias

While the media slobbers violently all over the Patraeus/Allen scandal, here's three questions to take into your Wednesday:
1) Why were the names Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley ever made public in the first place? These women are not guilty of a crime. The Grand Jury system exists (partially) to protect the anonymity of those loosely involved with a potential crime but should they be cleared of wrong-doing, their anonymity is supposed to remain intact. There are media vans parked 24/7 outside Paula Broadwell's house for no reason whatsoever.

2) And while the anonymity of these two women has ceased to exist (with no explanation as to why their names were released), the FBI agent/friend who sent Jill Kelley a shirtless photo of himself and apparently started this whole brushfire remains anonymous. Why?

3) While the media gushes constantly in our faces about the scandal, asking how it effects Benghazi, how it effects Obama's agenda, how it effects the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan...you have assuredly not heard from anyone that the incoming CEO of Lockheed-Martin (the largest defense contractor in the world) had to resign this past week due to an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.
Long-time readers know I have nothing but bad things to say about Lockheed-Martin. That their internal ethics investigation found evidence of unethical behavior from their top executive...causes me exactly 0.0001 seconds of surprise. But the question I have is why does no one seem to care about this? People might say "well Patraeus/Allen is a public servant and he is privy to secure, classified information that he might have leaked." You don't think the CEO of the largest defense contractor wasn't also privy to secure, classified information? Ethical lapses of judgement can lose you your clearance, believe me, as someone with security clearance, I would know. And just as Patraeus/Allen is perhaps accountable to all of us as a civil servant in our military, isn't the CEO of a company that gets TRILLION DOLLAR contracts (entirely tax payer funded) equally accountable to Americans? Yet we ignore this private sector scandal and focus on the one involving military men.


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Young Idealism Is Not Misguided, Ctd 2

I have to ask it: what would Robin Hanson tell a 25-year-old kid, who "had a vague inkling about how to make a difference but didn't know how to do it." Would he have empowered that young man to achieve every inch of his possibility, to embrace every chance for greatness, to throw his energy and intelligence at idealist causes?
If that 25-year-old came into Hanson's office and said "I want to 'attach myself' to causes like helping kids get an education and helping people who are living in poverty to get decent jobs and work. I want to make sure people don't have to go to the ER just to get health care." Would Hanson have told him "well then, you should not waste your time with charity, but instead you should learn and network. Save your money and let interest compound for charities later."
And when the 25-year-old kid doubled down and said "But a group of churches is willing to hire me to be a 'community organizer, should I take the job?" would Hanson have said:

News flash: you are just one of seven billion, so you aren’t going to personally make much difference. The world will have nearly as many problems worth solving then as now, with or without your help.

I am sure glad Hanson wasn't around to say that to this guy.

While my vitriol about many of Mr. Obama's policies remains intact, I am incredibly grateful that a man with a sturdy rudder and a patient brain is in charge of our country. I am grateful to those churches, 28 years ago, who hired a skinny kid to go throw his life away on altruism. I am grateful that people like Mr. Obama exist: people who want to improve the human condition in the present. People who don't think that progress of the Top 1% pulls the rest of society upwards, but rather that by raising the rest of society up from the bottom, the Top 1% is allowed to rise higher as a result.

But perhaps most of all I am grateful to my parents, for never once putting a damper on my own wild dreams and absurd hopes for the future.

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"World's Most Advanced"

First, watch this video. It's only 3 minutes long. Back? Okay let's get started.

First, that thing looks awesome. Independently articulating fingers, carbon fiber shell, neat whirring noise as it articulates, battery integrated into design and not externally worn...everything about it looks sweet. Even the carbon black color gives it an almost sinister, technological appearance.

But.

I watched that video and waited for the magic moment when I'd be impressed. Like, I kept hoping the hand would crush a can of soup or an orange, or he'd start playing Moonlight Sonata, or cop a feel on his wife, or even the individual fingers would wave at the camera. That magic moment never happened.
But I had expected it to. Because when someone calls a device "the world's most advanced" I have a level of expectation of being excited by what I'm about to witness. If someone posted a video of "the world's most advanced car" I don't want to see a humdrum Honda Civic - but with a new stereo!

I've written many times before on TAE about the various difficulties in producing a practical, functional upper extremity prosthetic (or exoskeleton for that matter). The human hand has more than a dozen muscles controlling it, all perfectly aranged inside the forearm where all the wrist muscles hide as well. Each muscle has been carefully evolved to give humans a unique, high speed, high control, high endurance system for moving their fingers. A perfect example is that I am blazing away at almost 100 words per minute on this blog post, making few errors, not watching my fingers, and my arm muscles show no signs of fatigue. Concert pianists play Rachmaninoff. Mechanics change alternators.
Honestly, the brilliance of human anatomy is typified in our hands, and the wide breadth of motions we can produce with them.

This beBionic arm is great, for many reasons. But I was disappointed. An amputee, forces to dress with one arm, forced to hold his kids with one arm, forced to zip his fly with one hand...he probably finds this technology wonderful, and the happiness of the man featured in the video is evident.
But as I watched that guy have to use his "good" arm to click his prosthetic into a different mode, and I watch the prosthetic slowly whirr into a different grip, I felt frustration.

I felt frustration because we can do better.

There will come a day when a person is in a serious car accident. Unconscious, they are rushed to the hospital and their shattered arm is amputated. A simple procedure will mount a socket on their new stump, and microscopic electrodes will detect the nerve endings and interface with them. A prosthetic arm will be attached to the socket. After several hours, the patient will awaken and their new prosthetic arm will function exactly like their other biological one. There will be no training or rehab or calibration necessary. Like trading in an iPhone 4 for an iPhone 4s.
Then there will come a day when we will attend concerts where pianists will have willingly traded out their biological arms for prosthetic ones because it allows them to play faster, longer, better. Larger prosthetic hands will give them a greater range on the keyboard.
And there will come a day when prosthetic hands look and feel just like real ones. We'll know friends for years and never realize they were an amputee. Then one day they'll disconnect their arm and it'll scare us senseless and then we'll laugh about it. It'll be a party gag.

Every day there are more engineers. Every day we get more advanced technology to play with. And in the years to come a thousand prosthetic arms will be produced, each a little more advanced than the last. Each smarter. Each more real. It's naive to pretend that we can go from point A to point B without the long journey in between. But its okay to be impatient too.


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Young Idealism Is Not Misguided, Ctd

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." -Chuck Palahnuik

Hanson gratiously responds. And now that I know he is listening I just want to say I find him an incredible person and am a devoted and long-time reader. His article on Unfriendly AI led me to read Singularity Rising, which I enjoyed. Nevertheless (and probably because I am a fan and subsequently hold him to a high standard), I stand by what I wrote regarding his post. I appreciate his response.

But I must say the whole of his last two posts has given me chills, mostly due to the raw fatalism Hanson is exhibiting:

News flash: you are just one of seven billion, so you aren’t going to personally make much difference. The world will have nearly as many problems worth solving then as now, with or without your help.

This, from a blog entitled "overcoming bias"! Hanson started this whole thread by stating that Young Idealists ask for his advice. Is his advice, like the Palahnuik quote above, that none of us is capable of anything significant and the world will always be messed up, so why bother? Is he really suggesting that if a Young Idealist, bright-eyed and full of energy and talent, went out to lunch with him and said "to what charities should I donate?!" the correct response of a Middle Aged Person is "you will probably not make a difference in the world." Because essentially that is the advice he has given me.

Actually, I really don't think that is Hanson's advice. Or at least it wasn't in September. And here's where the cognitive dissonance is starting to bother me. On September 24th, Hanson published a post entitled "Covert virtue - the signal that doesn't bark?" (in my opinion the most important thing he's written in 2012) in which he concludes that "private giving, far from being consistent with a pure and virtuous motivation, is actually deeply suspicious." Further, he suggests:

Firstly, it means we are less inclined to talk about and share the information we have about which causes are most valuable and effective. Given that donations to charity and other approaches to making the world a better place vary in cost effectiveness across many orders of magnitude, this is a huge loss. 

Secondly, if people can’t gain social acceptance from altruistic acts, those acts will tend to be crowded out by alternatives that are unavoidably conspicuous – impressive cars, holidays, degrees and so forth – that will do a better job of signalling how rich, noble and interesting they are.

Let me explain. No, that would take to long. Let me sum up. Hanson wants:
1. People to publicize their charitable giving so that others can aggregate this information, derive value from it, and make informed charitable gifts themselves.
2. Publicizing individual charity will make it more socially acceptable and subsequently decrease the social value placed upon consumptionism and material wealth.
3. People under age 40 should not take part in 1 or 2.

See the problem yet? If, as Hanson states in both his original treatise and his response to me, altruism can be used to broadcast attractiveness - but Young Idealists should refrain from charitable giving until their interest compounds - then they have no better way to project attractiveness other than through conspicuous consumption of material goods during the age broadcasting attractiveness is most important to them.

On the other hand, if we were to take Hanson's arguments a different way, here's a much better alternative: Middle Agers who make charitable gifts publicize it. This allows Young Idealists to see what are intrinsically valuable charities per the advice of the Middle Agers, and allows the Young Idealists to know behind which causes they should throw their zeal.

Reimagine the above scenario. The Young Idealist goes to lunch with Hanson, and rather than getting told they aren't a unique snowflake, rather than getting told to cool off and spend two decades networking and learning, instead they can talk about Hanson's well-publicized charitable gifts, and how that Young Idealist might contribute their mental and physical energies on those same charities...while they wait for the interest to compound.


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