Campaign Primers: Of Worlds Unknown

What Am I going to say.

Right.

Avatar Press produced some eariler softcore smut in comic book format eariler in this decade under a running title called Jungle Fantasy. Interesting theme, if shallow on plot and character development. Seriously the short series produces serious eye candy for young adult males. It reminds me or Mike Grill's Warlord series DC published way backin the late 70's and early 80's when scinece fiction, (which owes George Lucas more favors than a deity owing his congregation), sheds its b-film pulp paper-esque themes and became a significant mainstream gold mine. I've always wanted to do a theme-based campaign around a lost world type scenario, but with strong elements of both science fiction and fantasy. Think of dinosaurs and primitive shamans mingling with ancient psuedo-Atlantean technology. The hay-day equipment waiting to be re-discovered. Old technology like cloning pods and maturation chambers, light-solid holographic transmitters, genetic engineering that can build extinct species from the floor up, disruptor rifles, and blasters. Machines that cna build modern mythical creatures or produce the proverbial "fire of the gods." Think of forgotten arcane lore waiting to be unearthed again. Ah sorcerers, slavers, warlords, gladiators, big game hunters, archeaologists, socialites, thieves, merchants and explorers all in one setting striving to do the best they can.

Cloning machines, bio-organic matter replicators, incubation chambers, artificial maturation envirnoments, imprinting and behaviorial nanotechnology, surgical droids, and ancient human races manipulating their very building blocks of life. Abandoned Nazi (an over used theme in my book) or Stalinist Communist research faculties still housing great unearthed secrets.

Yes, what fun.

What game mechanics would I select?

I had d20 Future in mind, but after downloading and skimming Reign of Discordia by Reality Deviations Publications and RPG Objects. Instead, I could switch to True20 by Green Ronin Games. A levelI think this system will work best and if I need stock monsters, especially dinosaurs, I can always barrow from other source books. The Menance Manial and GURPS: Dinosaurs are two books that spring to mind. A level-based system would do for a solid fantasy RPG, but I need something out more in a super-heroic genre. Green Ronin games, through their Mutants and Masterminds line of games has released a supplement called Warriors and Warlocks. I like the point based approach to super-heroics, and with a larger selection of based-stock creatures, I could easily assemble a campaign using this material. An added plus is the character templates M&M provides across several sourcebooks.

What can I use for technology? A mixture of archaic, modern, and lost science fiction seems to work best. Both D20 weapon's locker and d20 future could work but I would need a simple system for conversion. Not that it would be difficult to move one from the other. I believe Green Ronin provide that in the back of their own books. Again, I have old GURPS books, including Bio-Tech and Futures for those necessities. Weirdly enough, my old Gamma World books could be useful as well providing insight into eugenics, pure strain human, and altered human branches. Comic book source materials could include Jungle Fanatsy (again), Dynamite Press's Jungle Girl, and Mike Grell's the Warlord, the later as a more detailed realm if there ever was such a place.

More on this later.

The Realm would also be mutli-envirnomental enabling the world to host several thousand diverse species and cultures from earth's past and from other worlds as well.

I wonder if I could have shape changin monsters as well. Infernal sorcery would be the most obvious mechanic to initiate a metamorphosis. I do not believe technology or gentic engineering would do as any changes would be permanent and have the potenital to pass itself down to it descendents.

More on this later as I have other posts to, well, post.

Shifting Gears - Bbzzbzzzzzz, Or One the Day the Insect Will Rule the Earth

Giant Insects Might Reign If Only There Was More Oxygen in the Air

PhysOrg.Com

The delicate lady bug in your garden could be frighteningly large if only there was a greater concentration of oxygen in the air, a new study concludes. The study adds support to the theory that some insects were much larger during the late Paleozoic period because they had a much richer oxygen supply, said the study’s lead author Alexander Kaiser.

The study, “No giants today: tracheal oxygen supply to the legs limits beetle size,’’ was presented at Comparative Physiology 2006: Integrating Diversity.

The Paleozoic period, about 300 million years ago, was a time of huge and abundant plant life and rather large insects -- dragonflies had two-and-a-half-foot wing spans, for example. The air’s oxygen content was 35% during this period, compared to the 21% we breathe now, Kaiser said. Researchers have speculated that the higher oxygen concentration allowed insects to grow much bigger.

Tubes carry oxygen

First, a bit of background: Insects don’t breathe like we do and don’t use blood to transport oxygen. They take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide through holes in their bodies called spiracles. These holes connect to branching and interconnecting tubes, called tracheae, Kaiser explained.

Whereas humans have one trachea, insects have a whole tracheal system that transports oxygen to all areas of their bodies and removes carbon dioxide. As the insect grows, tracheal tubes get longer to reach central tissue, and get wider or more numerous to meet the additional oxygen demands of a larger body.

Insects can limit oxygen flow by closing their spiracles. In fact, one reason insects are so hardy is that they can close their spiracles and live off the oxygen they already have in their tracheae. Kaiser recalled a caterpillar that fell into a bucket of water in his lab. When the creature was discovered the next day, lab workers thought it had drowned. But when they removed its apparently lifeless little body from the water, they were surprised to see it crawl away.

Tracheae grow disproportionately

This experiment was designed to find out:

• how much room the tracheal system takes up in the bodies of different-sized beetles
• whether tracheal dimensions increase proportionately as the beetles get larger
• whether there is a limit to the size a beetle could grow in the current atmosphere

The researchers used x-ray images to compare the tracheal dimensions of four species of beetles, ranging in size from 3mm (Tribolium castaneum, about one-tenth of an inch) to about 3.5 cm (Eleodes obscura, about 1.5 inches). Beetles were not in existence during the Paleozoic period, but Kaiser’s team used the insect because they are much easier to maintain in the laboratory than dragonflies, which are quite difficult.

The study found that the tracheae of the larger beetles take up a greater proportion of their bodies, about 20% more, than the increase in their body size would predict, Kaiser said. This is because the tracheal system is not only becoming longer to reach longer limbs, but the tubes increase in diameter or number to take in more air to handle the additional oxygen demands.

The disproportionate increase in tracheal size reaches a critical point at the opening where the leg and body meet, the researchers found. This opening can get only so big, and limits the size of the trachea that runs through it. When tracheal size is limited, so is oxygen supply and so is growth, Kaiser explained.

Using the disproportional increases they observed among the beetles, the researchers calculated that beetles could not grow larger than about 15 centimeters. And this is the size of the largest beetle known: the Titanic longhorn beetle, Titanus giganteus, from South America, which grows 15-17 cm, Kaiser said.

And why wouldn’t the opening between the body and the leg limit insect size in the Paleozoic era, too? After all, dragonflies and some other insects back then had the same body architecture, but they were much bigger.

It is because when the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is high, the insect needs smaller quantities of air to meet its oxygen demands. The tracheal diameter can be narrower and still deliver enough oxygen for a much larger insect, Kaiser concluded.

The research was carried out by Alexander Kaiser and Michael C. Quinlan of Midwestern University, Glendale, Arizona; J. Jake Socha and Wah-Keat Lee, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL; and Jaco Klok and Jon F. Harrison, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Harrison is the principal investigator.

Source: American Physiological Society

Shifting Gears:Biometric Palm Readers

Giving biometrics a hand
Palm-reading system used to safeguard patient records

By Bryn Nelson
Source: msnbc.com

A perceptive palm reader is helping one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S. divine the true identities of its patients, ushering in a new era of biometric identity verification.

The device, resembling a small black cube and manufactured by Tokyo-based Fujitsu Corp., uses a vascular pattern recognition system to accurately identify people while they hold their palm just above the cube. The scan, requiring less than a second, captures the unique branching pattern of blood veins and instantly converts key data points into a numerical code that can be compared with other palm scans to identify matches. The miniaturized device can plug into a laptop computer via a USB port, while an alternative version released last year incorporates the palm scanner into a computer mouse to facilitate secure logins.

Carolinas HealthCare System, the nation’s third largest public healthcare provider, began using PalmSecure last year in several major hospitals as part of the nation’s first biometric patient identification system based on vascular recognition technology. Now deployed at eight locations and two urgent care facilities, the identification program has enrolled about 170,000 patients in all. Once patients have registered their unique biometric “vein template,” it can be linked directly to their medical records.

“We have had excellent patient response and the product has performed well with no failures or replacements required to date after more than one year of use,” said Carolinas spokesman Jim Burke in an e-mail interview. The main challenge, Burke said, has been educating patients on the program’s benefits.

By accurately identifying patients when they check in, he said, the palm-based system has virtually eliminated the risk that a person’s Social Security number or health insurance identification card could be used by someone else to fraudulently access their records or access healthcare services.

How it works
At its core, the palm-reading system works by recording subdermal vein patterns.

“Subdermal means the information resides inside a person’s skin, and it cannot be altered by external factors such as cuts, burns, abrasions and any other skin condition,” said Hiroko Naito, business development manager at Fujitsu Computer Products of America. The technology extracts enough information from the vein pattern to create a unique template.

To acquire each vein pattern template, the technology uses “near-infrared reflection photography,” in which a high-performance camera essentially snaps a digital picture of the vein pattern within a person’s palm. The method exploits a distinctive characteristic of deoxygenated hemoglobin carried by blood: its ability to absorb near-infrared light and create a unique distortion of the light reflected back.

A computer algorithm extracts several data points from the resulting image and converts them into a compressed, encrypted and numbered vein template. The number can be correlated with bank, medical or other personal accounts, and a matching algorithm produces a similarity score for every new palm scan, deciding whether a similarity threshold has been exceeded and the pair can be scored as a match.

More accurate than fingerprints
Many banks in Japan have similarly begun using palm-based recognition as an extra level of security in case ATM cards are lost or stolen, Naito said.

“Japanese banks use PalmSecure for verifying the ATM card owner at the point of transaction via an ATM machine,” she said. Japanese ATM cards are typically “smart cards” embedded with a micro memory chip that can hold additional identification information. The card owner’s PalmSecure vein template is stored in each smart card, she said, and the owner must provide the proper biometric information plus the PIN code to complete a card transaction.

The technology, which debuted in Japan in 2004, has begun catching on in the U.S., and Naito said similar systems could be used for self-service kiosks and terminals, to record work time and attendance, or to control physical access to secure areas. Beyond the system’s high accuracy, she said, palm-based identification boasts the advantage of being more widely applicable than biometrics based on conventional comparisons such as fingerprints.

Although fingerprint recognition is more widely used for identifying people, Naito said fingerprint sensors often don’t provide enough data points for critical verification decisions. (Typically, 12 to 18 data points are needed.)

“The sensor device typically requires direct contact of a finger and is dependent upon the surface condition of the skin,” she said, meaning that dry or abraded skin can interfere with the system’s reliability. Skin diseases such as psoriasis can also impede print recognition. And some people with genetic disorders are born without fingerprints at all, limiting the system’s applicability among the general public.

Researchers generally agree that iris scanning generates the highest level of accuracy in biometrics, but Naito contends the technology is not well accepted because of its highly intrusive nature.

“People are uncomfortable exposing their eyes to some unfamiliar lights,” she said, adding that the system can force people to change their normal behavior, such as wearing contact lenses or long bangs. The technology also can be cost prohibitive and challenging to install and operate, requiring frequent adjustments for the height and angle of different faces to obtain a good eye scan.

Security Features
Carolinas determined that the palm recognition technology’s accuracy and security features offered the best option for its patient network, Burke said.

Because a computer algorithm immediately translates the image of palm veins into a number, the image cannot be stolen and reused, and patient privacy can be better safeguarded. In addition, database retrieval is faster because a number, not an image, is accessed, he said. Improved accuracy reduces that chance that patient records could be accidentally confused. Finally, patients place their hand a few inches above the device instead of actually touching it, eliminating the need for frequent cleanings and decreasing the potential for equipment damage.

“During our analysis and research, we also determined that other types of biometric identification either required touch (fingerprint), or were deemed too invasive by the general public (retinal scanning),” Burke said.

Naito stressed that because the PalmSecure system stores numbers instead of images, the vein pattern information would be incomprehensible to anyone who tapped into the system illegally. But perhaps one the best selling points of all, she said, is the algorithm’s low “false acceptance ratio” of 0.00008 percent, meaning that it incorrectly matches a vein template less than once per million tries — an error rate that even the best human palm-reader would be hard-pressed to match.

© 2009 msnbc.com

True20: London's Afire

Whoever she is, whoa, she has a great pair of guns.

London is on Fire.

Shifting Gears: Metallic Glass

Solving the Mysteries of Metallic Glass

by David Chandler PhysOrg.com

-- Researchers at MIT and the National University of Singapore have made significant progress in understanding a class of materials that has resisted analysis for decades. Their findings could lead to the rapid discovery of a variety of useful new kinds of glass made of metallic alloys with potentially significant mechanical, chemical and magnetic applications.

The first examples of metallic alloys that could be made into glass were discovered back in the late 1950s and led to a flurry of research activity, but, despite intense study, so far nobody had solved the riddle of why some specific alloys could form glasses and others could not, or how to identify the promising candidates, said Carl. V. Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and director of the Materials Processing Center at MIT. A report on the new work, which describes a way to systematically find the promising mixes from among dozens of candidates, was published last week in Science.

Glasses are solids whose structure is essentially that of a liquid, with atoms arranged randomly instead of in the ordered patterns of a crystal. Generally, they are produced by quickly cooling a material from a molten state, a process called quenching.

“It is very difficult to make glasses from metals compared to any other class of materials, such as semiconductors, ceramics and polymers,” Thompson said. Decades of effort by scientists around the world have focused on “understanding and on exploiting the remarkable properties of these materials, and on understanding why some alloy compositions can be made into glasses and others cannot,” he said.

They still haven’t solved that “why,” Thompson said. But this new work does “provide a very specific and quantitative new insight into the characteristics of liquid alloys that can most readily be quenched into the glassy state,” he said, and thus provides a much more rapid way of discovering new alloys that have the right properties.

The research was the result of a collaboration between Thompson and MIT post-doc Johannes A. Kalb with Professor Yi Li and graduate student Qiang Guo at the National University of Singapore, working together across thousands of miles of separation through the Singapore-MIT Alliance. Essentially, the work consisted of producing an array of different alloys with slightly varying proportions of two metals, each deposited on a separate microscopic finger of metal. Then, they analyzed the changes in density of each different mixture when the glass crystallized, and found that there were a few specific proportions that had significantly higher density than the others — and those particular alloys were the ones that could readily form glasses. Of three of these special proportions they found, two were already known glass-forming alloys, but the third was a new discovery.

The new work could even lead to a solution to the longstanding puzzle of why only certain alloys make glasses, he said. “I expect these new results, and the technique we developed to obtain them, will play a key, and hopefully decisive, role in solving the mystery of metallic glass formation.”

Such materials could have a variety of applications because of their unusual physical and magnetic properties, Thompson said. They are “soft” magnetically, meaning that it’s very easy to change the magnetic orientation of the material. This is a highly desirable characteristic for the cores of transformers, for example, which must switch their magnetic orientation dozens of times per second. Transformers made from metallic glasses could potentially greatly reduce the amount of electricity wasted as excess heat in conventional transformers, reducing the need for new generating plants.

In addition, these glasses are unusually hard mechanically and have a high degree of springiness (known technically as a high “elastic modulus”). This springiness could make them a useful material for some sports equipment such as golf clubs or tennis rackets, Thompson said. Although metallic glasses are relatively expensive, he said, for some people interested in the best-performing sports equipment, or in virtually unbreakable housings for cellphones, for example, “no expense is too high.”

The new research is a major accomplishment for the Singapore-MIT Alliance, Thompson said, and would not have been possible without the high-quality communications and collaboration tools it provides. Despite their physical separation, “Prof. Li and I have been working together now for almost ten years,” he said. “We routinely meet via video conferencing and have both been deeply involved in the co-supervision of the remarkable PhD student, Qiang Guo, who carried out this research.”

Thompson said he sees such collaborations as a significant example of a growing trend. “I think this and other accomplishments within the SMA program demonstrate that the future of research lies in technology-mediated collaborations among people with common interests and complementary capabilities, regardless of where the different parts of the team are located,” he said.

Provided by MIT

Shifting Gears: More Smart Dust

Dust and Mirrors Bring Smart World Closer
18:54 Tuesday 9th April 2002
Rupert Goodwins

New research shows how to make self-contained communicating computers the size of grains of salt

Every cranny of the environment could be filled with intelligence if experiments at the University of California at Berkeley fulfil their potential. Researchers working in a wide range of disciplines have created a series of tiny modules, complete with sensors and communications, with the aim of demonstrating 'smart dust' -- self-sustaining network nodes measuring millimetres or less per side.

The new technologies will find uses in environmental monitoring, health, security, distributed processing and tracking -- and doubtless create some uses of their own, including spotting when food is no longer fresh or has been in dangerous conditions. The team also predicts some more unusual devices, such as putting one mote under each fingernail and reporting back on movements -- making invisible keyboards, gesture control and 3D input devices.

Smart dust also has unique problems, many connected with power. While pure radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags just have to send back a unique identifier when interrogated and can use the energy in the interrogating signal, smart dust needs to power sensors, computation, storage and communication. Each of these tasks needs custom designs aimed at reducing power consumption to the bare minimum necessary. Batteries must be very tiny indeed, and while they can be recharged by solar cells or dynamos working from vibrations the power budget can easily be down to nanowatts.

Communications is especially tricky. Radio systems are flexible and reliable, but take relatively high power: most of the signal from any transmission is wasted in space. One of the key innovations the Berkeley scientists are testing is optical links by lasers and mirrors: a mote is illuminated from afar by a laser, and signals back by moving a mirror fabricated as part of a micro electrical mechanical system (MEMS) -- the new nanotechnology of building moving systems on chips.

By building reflectors into a corner-cube retroreflector (CCR) -- three mirrored surfaces at 90 degrees to each other, with the property of sending light back in the direction it came from -- the dust can signal at a great distance with practically no power, of the order of 10,000 times less than by radio. The same laser beam can also carry programs and data into the mote, providing two-way communications. In tests, the researchers have signalled more than 21 kilometres using a standard hand-held laser pointer and electronic sensors: the team says that in principle, it may even be possible to signal to satellites in 300km orbits.

Ultra low power sensing systems are also being developed. Analogue to digital converters -- essential for temperature, pressure, sound and light measurements -- are typically quite power hungry, but a new design works at under 2 microwatts and should be able of nearly halving that. It can also just sample to the level of accuracy required, avoiding the need to do a full 8-bit sample when only a couple of bits of data are required. The team says that with a battery just a cubic millimetre big, the circuit could take ten samples a second for a hundred years. Along similar lines, the team is developing custom processors that have instruction sets designed to encode sensor readings with maximum power efficiency, and to handle communications protocols similarly optimised.

Many prototypes have been demonstrated, most called 'macro-motes' and built out of bigger, commercially available components to prove various concepts. These have included measuring temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, light intensity, tilt and vibration, and magnetic fields all in a cubic inch package, including two-way radio, the microprocessor controller, and the battery. One such prototype was used with the laser pointer signalling system to relay weather information across San Francisco Bay.

The team has acknowledged that smart computers the size of grains of sand monitoring everything around them and sending out signals create some privacy and secrecy issues, but dismiss these as less important than the benefits. Although they've yet to show a fully working mote using the full range of technologies working together, progress is rapid and working examples are expected in a year or so.

Shifting Gears: Sensor Systems, Communication and Inflitration

Tech's Future - Smart Dust and Ratbots
09:21 Thursday 16th January 2003
Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com

Research firm IDC gives us a glimpse of emerging technologies that may one day lead to great changes in the industry

Smart Dust, Lily Pads and Ratbots.

These technologies are far from being household names. And they're not exactly tripping off the tongues of most IT market researchers, either. But they could one day be as significant as the microprocessor or the mouse, according to a report issued on Wednesday by research firm IDC.

"We looked at technologies that were beyond the radar screen of normal market research," said John Gantz, IDC chief research officer. "These are technologies not technically covered by IDC on a usual basis."

Gantz and David Emberley, an IDC senior research analyst, identified nine technologies that have backing from universities and major national laboratories and offer the potential to change lives.

The researchers identified smart dust, lily pads, ratbots, nanotubes, nanomachines, quantum computing, plastic transistors, the Semantic Web and grid computing as technologies to watch, although they noted some of these were more likely to materialise in our lifetime than others.

Ratbots are being used to test the possibility of transmitting information between a living thing and a computer via implants. A ratbot setup consists of an electronic "backpack", worn by a rat, and sensors implanted in the rat's brain. Signals are sent to the backpack and then instructions are sent to the rat's brain via the sensors, Gantz said.

The ratbot is just one of several developments in this area, Gantz said. For example, Kevin Warwick, a University of Reading professor, implanted a chip in his arm that transmitted information to a computer. When Warwick clenched his hand, a robot would follow suit via a computer connection.

Such technology could be used for prosthetics and memory aids, Gantz said. It could also be used in communications and for monitoring. Gantz adding that we're likely to see minor medical advances using this technology in our lifetime.

Smart dust, meanwhile, refers to tiny sensors, about the size of an eraser head, used for logistics, monitoring and preventative maintenance. These intelligent, active sensors are already in limited use, with one Australian company deploying the technology to detect hot spots on train wheels and identify aging wheel bearings.

Ultrastrong, light-emitting nanotubes will also likely be put to use in the foreseeable future, gaining use for computer circuits and flat panel displays. But other technologies looked at by IDC may take time to catch on. The concept of linking wireless networks like lily pads may not float, Gantz said. In part because of market considerations.

Linking wireless networks poses a threat to carriers that transmit information and data long distances over their networks, Gantz said. And the entrenched players with their expensive networks will seek ways to stop this lily pad linking, he added.

At the Bazaar of the Master of Gargoyles - Feats