[extropy-chat] Nanotech educations

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Tue Jun 29 15:48:17 UTC 2004


We seem to be talking past each other.  I don't know
how to phrase it to get my point across, and I saw
nothing in your post that convinced me of your point
of view.

--- Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> You have a library of deposition and abstraction
> reactions. You have the
> trajectory, the steric constraints and the control
> signals and the logic
> generating said signals (which is sequential with
> some local feedback for
> extra precision).
> 
> This is the hard part. How to paint 3d stuff and
> generate instruction streams
> from your description if screamingly trivial in
> comparison.

Hmm.  Consider the architectures I posted in response
to Chris's post.  Would you consider either of them
to use an extremely constrained (and thus relatively
easy to create) library, in this sense?

> Where are nano people discussing formats on CML,
> mmCIF, fricken OpenBabel of
> all things? Where are they?

At the moment?  Elsewhere, discussing GDS, EBMT, and
the like.  (It's not their fault they don't congregate
where you already are.  If you would preach new
formats, you must come to them.)

> We're not talking about a software library. We're
> talking about a reaction
> library, which is a set of educts, products, and the
> moeities trajectory and
> tool constraints. Which is very unlike shared
> object.

And more like part of a specification written in
English, right?  If so, then we agree here.  I'm just
pointing out the level of detail needed.

> There's almost nothing there as far as doing
> chemistry by manipulative
> proximal probe is concerned. Because it is extremely
> demanding
> instrumentally. Plus, very few people are seeing the
> point.
> 
> In comparison, computers are cheap. But nano geeks
> obviously don't grok
> Gaussian and Gamess.

Yep.  Because, as you said, there's almost nothing
there yet as far as the things they pay attention to.
However, "extremely demanding instrumentally" is
something we could in theory fix, by coming up with a
new instrument that can do this relatively easier.
And once someone does fix it, more of the people you
want will start paying attention.

You know they aren't paying attention.  I'm trying to
explain why, and how that cause (lack of hardware) can
be taken care of so the undesirable effect (them not
paying attention) will start to go away.



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