Current music:	"Runes And Men" -Death in Chicken
Entry tags:	science

How to get rich on people not understanding science
One of the things which I find hilarious to read are the speculative stock picks, based on "new" technologies.



I got some idjit motley fool today about Nanotech. As is usual with such rubbish, the new technology was declared to be a panacea; the world as we know it will end. There will be no more work; only infinite wealth generated by our nanoscopic robot slaves. The more frothing of such reports (including this one) indicates that, not only will they generate insane wealth, basically, by making things appear in genie-like fashion, they will also make us immortal. I'm not just making this crap up; people really write it. Other people really believe it. I even met an astounding charlatan on tribe.net who started a special interest group (to siphon money from gullible charitable foundations) calling for "responsible use of nanotech." As if there were presently any uses of "nanotech," irresponsible or otherwise. This idea of the imagined technology wreaking havoc comes from that ninny who invented Java: he has been claiming we are in dire danger of scientists creating nanorobots who would immediately eat everything and turn the world into "grey goo."

Let me guess; Bill Joy watched this before he had the idea that scientist made "grey goo" was going to take over the world. Either that, or he contemplated what happened to the software industry after he released Java.



I am here to tell you, there is no "nanotech." Humans make things on a nanoscale. We always have. Every time I choke the chicken thinking about the Olsen twins, I make billions of little nanobots which shoot out into the environment looking for Olsen twin ova and ... turn into the pervasive dust you will find in any bachelor apartment, back to the time of the cavemen. While I'd like to imagine my masturbatory leavings forming itself into a giant monster that eats starlets, kicks Steeve McQueen's ass and rampages through small american cities, that's just my own peculiar fantasy land. if I tried to sell that to somebody, they'd lock me up in a looney bin. As well they should people who claim such dangers from nonexistant dangerous technologies which are unlikely to ever be invented.


I got your grey goo world destroying nanothingees right here ladies!


Nanotech is another one of those things I made myself a "back of the envelope" expert on while I was procrastinating on writing my thesis in the physics library. That and talking to people on a daily basis who really do work on the nanoscale (surface scientists, who have been doing this since '65 or so, when vacuum chambers made it practical to do so). I read the whole Drexler magnum opus. Not carefully, as I was laughing too hard that anyone took this nonsense seriously, let alone allowed it as a Ph.D. thesis. That was some consolation in contemplating my own humble efforts, which were at least not total humbug. Allow me to summarize Drexler's book:

Behold, the Schroedinger equation!

With this mighty equation we may go forth and invent an entirely new form of chemistry, with which we may create new and superior forms of life which are mechanical in their form, rather than squishy inefficient biological looking things. We shall use the computer to do these things! It shall bring forth many great marvels!



angelic sounds in the background


That's it. That's what the whole book is. Oh yes, there are a few collections of tables and graphs purporting to indicate that such a thing might be possible, and Drexler does sketch out some impressive looking mechanical designs of what he supposes a nanobot might look like, but, without more than a passing justification, he seems to lack the imagination to figure out what a real nanosized doodad might look like. Much of his thesis seems to be hand wavey arguments that such "looking rather a lot like a meter scale object" designs were actually valid on a nano or small microscale. I know for a fact that they are not. You can wave your hands around all you want; when you stick an atomic force microscope down on nanosized thingees, you know what forces they produce. Duh. Drexler would also occasionally notice that his perfect little robots would probably, you know, oxidize, like most reactive things do, and embarassedly consign them to Ultra High Vacuum chambers. Then sometimes he would forget, and enthusiastically stick them everywhere. None of the chemistry was done. Little real thought was given to thermodynamics or where the energy was coming from for all these cool Maxwell-Demon like "perpetual motion" reactions. It was never noticed that computational chemistry is basically useless. Experimental results were rarely mentioned, or explained away with the glorious equation of Schroedinger, with which, all things seemed possible. Self assembly was apparently deemed routine, despite the fact that nobody knows how to engineer such things, or even really when to expect them.


Lookit; it will be easy; just take these red balls, and stick them to the blue balls and you have a bearing surface! -so sez Drexler; not really -so sez my atomic force microscope; little things are sticky: duh



There is nano sized tech; lithographic electronic chip features are down to this size now. As far as nano objects for manipulating things on nanoscales; such things don't exist. Imagining self replicating nanobots or nano machines is ridiculous. We don't even have micromachines. Seriously; mechanical objects on microscales do not exist. On milliscales, everything that I have seen is lithographically etched. Is it cool? Yep; it's kind of cool. I have already worked for a "millitech" company which was going to use tiny accelerometers to do sensing stuff in your cell phone. Will it change the universe? Nope. Such things have been available for probably 200 years now (think, pocketwatch); lithography just allows us to mass produce such things easier out of things like silicon. By the way, Drexler never really talked about lithography as a technique for building his mini robots. With good reason. You can only make 2-d stuff lithographically. Make something "3-d" and it has to be layers of 2-d stuff. You're not even going to make a mechanical watch that way. So, while the nanofruits point and gawk a lot at the little levers in MEMS devices ... beeeg deal.


My chums made some of these; cool huh?

The thing to really look at is biotech. In biotech, we are now able to use some fancy data mining techniques to figure out how some drugs work on some kinds of cells. Sort of. They can also take sequences of genes and make one kind of organism make proteins from another kind of organism using various bags of tricks. In fact, they're pretty good at this now. It is a nice trick which makes a lot of sick people well. In the old days, for example, they used to get insulin from horses. Now, they grow it in test tubes from toilet water bacteria (I think). They've even improved on gods version a little bit. That's pretty cool. But we're far from doing any of the nanotech miracles promised by Drexler and company, using biotech. In fact, even sort of obvious things, like tailoring drugs to diseases and individuals: total impossibility (marketing dudes are selling this; science types are not doing it). How about making photosynthetic machines which produce gasoline? You're still better off using soybeans. In fact, you're still better off using old fashioned soybean breeding, rather than gene spliced soybeans. Alas biotech. Quintuple alas nanotech.

Presently the best scam to be in, in nanoland is claiming to use nanoparticles in your whatever. The thing is, we have always used nanoparticles in our whatevers. Before Drexler (BD?) we would call these nano-entities, "chemicals." But now people realize the marketing worth of claiming your sunscreen has "nanoparticles" in it, despite the fact that, well, all sunscreens do. Scotchguard is no longer marketed as a chemical that makes it easy to clean your pantaloons; it is now rebranded a "nanoshield" of some kind. Some ding dong has managed to fool people into thinking they have specially engineered some tennis balls to be bouncy using ... nanothingees... Back when I was a boy, they called those, "chemical coatings."


Oh my goshness; self replicating, self assembling nano tennis balls! The world will never be the same!!

I wish I know more about stock speculating. I can easily spot the scammers. I can't destroy their reputations with the stock market; enough gullible people will always be taken in by such things, even if I were a famous writer. Just like people invested in the AI companies of the 1980s. You can't really short such companies, because, there is really nothing to short; they're all based on hype, like online petfood sellers. Do they sell 4 year short options? Can I buy a derivative that they are ultimately proved to be frauds?