Happy 40th birthday, Internet!

Seed magazine has posted an excerpt from my new book about DARPA in honor of today's anniversary of the first connection on the Internet.

No, no, it wasn't Al Gore who created the Internet. It was the Advanced Research Projects Agency, today known as DARPA. Way back in 1969, a couple of researchers at UCLA sent the first message between networked computers of disparate types. It was part of a project called the ARPANet, which formed the basis of the modern Internet.

DARPA book now available

My book on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is now available in print, electronic, and audio form.

The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Shaping Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs is the first mass market book on the Department of Defense Agency that gave the world the Internet, GPS, stealth technology, and lots more.

Listen to me read in this excerpt from the unabridged audiobook and then browse the printed version.

Quantum to Cosmos Festival

The Quantum to Cosmos Festival starts today in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It's ten days of presentations, panel discussions, movies, demos, and a whole lot more sponsored by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

You can catch most of the events live online at the festival website at http://q2cfestival.com/. For instance, tonight at 7 Eastern, 10 physicists talk about the future of their field.

Tune in to XPRIZE founder and CEO Peter Diamandis on Sunday at 1:00 PM. His topic: "The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent it Yourself!"

I'll be there starting on Thursday, October 22 at 8:00 PM on a panel with Hod Lipson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Cory Doctorow on the Robotics Revolution and the Future of Evolution, which will also be broadcast as part of The Agenda with Paikin throughout the Toronto area.

2009 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards

Last night at the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards, Dean Kamen delivered the most eloquent appeal for getting kids interested in science and technology I've yet seen.

His remarks took the form of his acceptance speech for the Leadership Award. He was speaking off the cuff, but this is something he's been thinking about and actively working on for the last twenty years.

"This biggest problem this country has is a cultural problem," he told the gathered award winners and guests. The problem as he sees it is that we idolize entertainers and sports figures instead of "things that matter."

"We will make clean energy for everybody," he said, "for the six billion people. We will bring into reality all the things that we're now talking about. But to really make that happen, to dramatically increase the odds of that happening, the first thing that we need to do is mobilize way, way, way more kids to really embrace what is on the pages of Popular Mechanics."

Who's telling kids, particularly women and minorities and inner city kids around the united states, 'these other things, they're fun, they're pastimes, you know, but the probability you'll ever make money in sports is way lower than the probability you'll win the state lottery? If you want to develop a muscle, how about trying to exercise the one between your ears? Besides, thinking is the only sport where humans play in the unlimited category. I mean, you think that football player's big and tough, put an elephant on the field. You think that track star is fast, put a gazelle on the field.'

That's why Kamen has developed robotics as a contact sport for students, called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

Meantime, Kamen's company, DEKA Research, and all the other award winners brought their inventions to show off--including, yes, this flying car by Steve Saint parked in front of PM headquarters, the Hearst Tower.

One of the demos was hands on; I got to try out the future of video games, Project Natal. It's a system, built for the Xbox 360, that uses the human body as the input device. No more mashing painful little chicklet buttons in arcane combinations to punch, fly, shoot, or whatever. I drove a video game car simply by making steering motions with my hands and thrusting my foot forward to operate an imaginary gas pedal. It's the iPhone of the video game world, and it will instantly render all other systems obsolete.

X PRIZE five year anniversary

On this day five years ago, Brian Binnie won the Ansari X PRIZE by hurtling out of the atmosphere faster than a rifle bullet. It was the second time in less than a week that SpaceShipOne made the trip from Mojave Airport, fulfilling the prize requirement for a back-to-back flight by a commercial spaceship.

Even as Brian was circling to his high altitude launch point attached to the belly of White Knight, down on the ground I was closing the deal for my first feature story in a national magazine. Brian's triumph was mine as well; the X PRIZE launched my career as a journalist.

In that moment, anything seemed possible, even a struggling science fiction writer with a theater degree becoming a nationally known aerospace journalist.

Brian tells the story of our generation's moon shot on the Huffington Post. I never tire of him describing the "blessed peace and quiet and the instant karma of weightlessness."

And then, my God, that view! Separating the black void that is space from the peaceful panorama below is a thin blue electric ribbon of light that is the atmosphere. For 4 minutes I got to soak it all in. I tell you, one cannot be unmoved by the experience!

After I helped file a story for Reuters, I drove up the coast to my family's vacation spot near Santa Barbara, and my wife and I made our first baby. Which is why my book Rocketeers is dedicated to "my X PRIZE baby."

Transhumans in Woodstock

I love this town. Last night, just down the road from my office on Tinker Street, in the same studio where I recorded this video, a group of world-class thinkers in applied science fiction came together to talk about what it means to be human.

Ray Kurzwell, James J. Hughes, and Martine Rothblatt concluded that we are little more than the processing power of our neurons--a function that will soon (by 2029 says Kurzwell) be duplicated by machines. All we'll have to do to back up the wetware between our ears will be to gather as many bits of information about our behavior and memories as possible and feed them into a database.

The one hold out was Wendall Wallach, who questioned whether human emotions will ever be duplicated by machines. "Human beings are evolved, biochemical, emotional instruments out of which higher order rational faculties came in a much later stage in that development--really, in the last 50 to 100,000 years. Our rational faculties are not distinct from our emotional beings."

To which Kurzwell responded, it is true that emotional, empathic thought is the cutting edge of human cognition."But it's not something mystical or magical, it's something the brain does, it's something we can understand and recreate and enhance."

The film 2B, produced by Rothblatt and addressing these issues in dramatic form, followed the panel discussion a couple of hours later.