I've been home a whole week now and it's been fine.  What a feeling it is, to wake up in my own bed, not having to wonder what city I'm in, not having to live out of a suitcase, not having to brace myself for that next bout of travel flu -- airports, taxis, trains, hotels -- no, I'm just home.  A whole week of it...with many more weeks to come.  I will likely not have to travel again until September -- but then again, maybe I'm all ready starting to feel like I should be flying somewhere.

It's been quite hot in New York the past few days.  This is the third heat wave the city has seen this summer -- I missed the first two.  But I am not spared this one, and believe me, when it's hot in New York, it's hot.

The big news of the week (or is that the "bit" news), from my perspective at least, was that of the Hewlett-Packard/UCLA announcement regarding molecular computing: a chemical breakthrough in our ability to make fundamental constituents of logic on extremely small scales possible. Technology based on crystal computer chips could be made so small as to actually bootstrap nanotechnology into the realm of the real.

Related, perhaps orthogonally, to molecular comuting might be quantum computing.  Based on some of those wild and tricky aspects of quantum mechanics, it too promises a tremendous breakthrough in computer design possibilities.  Imagine the capabilities of the fastest supercomputer of today shrunk to the size of an ant's head, or smaller.  Imagine supersmart, bacteria sized robots and the possibilities such creatures would engender.  Want to eraticate the AIDS virus from a human body?  No problem.  Fix a broken limb?  Or better yet, grow a new one when the old one has been severed?  A new heart?  Or liver?  Or even create an entirely new vessel to house human consciousness.  Why not?

On a related note, NASA is working on  personal satellite assistants for astronauts; tennis-ball-sized robotic helpers that will float around spacecraft monitoring stuff and doing little helpful tasks. Robotics, it seems, will enjoy a resurgence of interest, enabled primarily by compute engines migrating to the world of the microscopic.

Nanobots, bug-sized robots, personal satellite assistants -- all of these are the heirs to Moore's Law.  Computing capabilities on such a small scale are the literal enablers of just such an array of microscopic gnomes -- Kleinstmenschen, not unlike the German fairy tale, who come in the middle of the night while everyone is sleeping to fix all things and do all the needed work; undetected, silent, forgiving, relentless.  We're at the brink of just such a technological utopia.   Now if we could just control the weather!  :)

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