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Wired didn't make me wait very long to find an illustration of a point I made last week in Washington. "Big Concern for Very Small Things" mentions the Nanodesu buckyball bowling ball. The reporter rolls out the balls, however, as merely a transitional vehicle to get to where he really wanted to go: From apples to oranges to, yes, fish. Our poor, brain-damaged bass.
Nanotechnology is such a young discipline that any issue for which the nano name is invoked is largely a reflection of a personal world view or political agenda rather than any overwhelming body of evidence.
Lisa Napoli, senior reporter for public radio's Marketplace did an admirable job of injecting a wide range of ideas about nanotechnology in such a short amount of time in Tuesday's report.
Hitting myself with a “60-Minutes”-style ambush interview, I made short work of my sentiment: Not all water is “pure,” whether from natural sea salt or manmade pollution. So, to “arrogantly” manipulate matter on the molecular level can also be to bring it back to an ideal state.
Luddites to the left of me, the religious to the right; and here I am, stuck in the middle with nano.
Back to Feynman. In my previous post, I talked about how the nanotech founding father's words get me through my morning commute. Feynman was big on making science understandable to everyday slobs like me. But I wonder how I would have handled this interview, relayed by Robert P. Crease in a March 2001 article in Physics Web, "Revenge of the Science Writer."
One of my dirty little secrets is that I listen to audiobooks from audible.com. This morning, I "read" (OK, had read to me), Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out." I'm a caffeine addict, but Feynman's words had, as the nanofather himself would say, a "kick" all its own.
There were only 20-30 people at Thursday's "Bad Rad Lab" protests against the Molecular Foundry groundbreaking at Berkeley, but it bugs me, nevertheless.
The portion of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that tries to safeguard against "potential use of nanotechnology in enhancing human intelligence and in developing artificial intelligence which exceeds human capacity" presages a debate that is growing in religious circles.
My recent rantings have rippled up and down the nanosphere and have had a far larger influence on the public debate over nanotech's future than I had ever expected. Scary. I'll take it from the top, but stay with it until the end, since there's a narrative flow with a bizarre ending.
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