David Egts: Hey Gunnar, what's new? Gunnar Hellekson: what is new. Gunnar Hellekson: I am here to endorse yet again the Paperlike screen protector for the iPad. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: It's a not that. David Egts: Yeah. What's changed since last time? Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: So, I finally used it in anger last week I was in meetings every day for the entire week in Raleigh. Gunnar Hellekson: And this screen protector,… David Egts: Uh-huh. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: it's got a nice feel nice finish on it. Was good on my fingers and made writing on my iPad a much more pleasant experience. I've never been a screen protector guy,… David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: but It's like getting a new iPad. That's what it's like. It was great. Gunnar Hellekson: Tell them all about it. David Egts: How… David Egts: how did the anger come into this? Gunnar Hellekson: No, I just used it angrily. I just scrolled viciously … David Egts: Okay. Gunnar Hellekson: and passive aggressively as I went through several of these meetings. Yeah. Yeah. David Egts: Nice. Do people notice? Gunnar Hellekson: Gunnar Hellekson: I'd like to think although I did bend a few pin tips, so maybe it wasn't as discreet as I would have liked. how about you? What's going on? David Egts: Keep breaking your Apple Pencil. Yeah. David Egts: yeah. Why does he keep smashing his iPad on the desk? Yeah. yeah. No, I'm doing good. Ready for spring. It's a balmy 39 degrees here. soon it'll be warm enough that I could get my motorcycle serviced and on the road. So, I'm looking forward to it. I'm also delighted that it's not dark at 400 pm. So, things are looking up. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: That is good. Hey, I never asked you where are you on electric bikes some motorcycles? Mhm. David Egts: So they're expensive and… David Egts: the range is very limited… Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Right. David Egts: because you think about it it's for the battery it's going to add a lot of if you think about the weight that a battery has it can't be a really big battery on a motorcycle from a power to weight ratio sort of thing and then also if it's topheavy whatever, So, I think it's going to be a while for the electric motorcycles to catch up cuz for me it's like I've seen typically the range is less than 200 miles or so and then it would take hours to charge and maybe there's fast charging now that makes it better. David Egts: But for me, it's like I often will do several trips a year that are 200 miles. And so it would be the full range of the motorcycle and I would be in the middle of Ohio in farm country with no electricity at all, let alone a charging station. Gunnar Hellekson: Mhm. yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Right right. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Gunnar Hellekson: It never occurred to me. You're right. the power to weight ratio kind of only makes sense for our car right now, I guess, until the batteries get better. Yeah. David Egts: Yeah. I replaced my mom's car battery died so I took it up to Advanced Auto Parts to have them check it and everything and so to take it out of the car it's amazing how much a car battery weighs in a Honda Civic compared to an EV car battery right and… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah. David Egts: and it's like wow that thing weighed like 75 lbs it's very dense lead acid battery David Egts: So it's crazy. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. I mean, when I drive electric cars, one of the things I like about it is that, the batteries are configured, I guess, what do they call a sled, right? it's like the whole bottom of the car is a battery and it keeps the center of gravity. David Egts: Yeah. Low center of gravity. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. some super low center of gravity. David Egts: Yeah. Yep. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. creates a very different driving experience, I would say. David Egts: And that's the thing like with a motorcycle, it's like if the battery is mounted horizontally vertically, right, with the frame, then is it topheavy or is it all on the bottom? because with a motorcycle, you don't steer it. you lean it to go around turns. you don't steer the handlebars on a bicycle. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Yeah. David Egts: So, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: right. David Egts: But it'll get there. David Egts: I'm sure. And it's like I can imagine there's going to be this convergence with, all the electric scooters and, things like that, then moving upstream to motorcycles and then, with cars trickling down to motorcycles and the, motorcycles will be in the middle. So, we'll see what happens. 00:05:00 Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, it seems like only a matter of time, I guess. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: All right. Glad I asked. David Egts: So, we have a fantastic show lined up. it's a lot of catchup of things that we've been talking about in the past. plus some new stuff, but yeah, this week we're going to be talking about remember the cockroaches with the backpacks. Gunnar Hellekson: How could I forget the nightmare of cockroaches? David Egts: Yeah. … Gunnar Hellekson: The backpacks. Yes. David Egts: we have an update on that. we had the hydrogels with playing pong instead of the brain organoids. David Egts: and then we also have hackers with digital license plates and what could possibly go wrong there? so for people to pick up their own paperlike screen protector, where should we send them? Yep. And then cutting room floor real quick. we got Progresso Soups. they actually have soup drops that you could buy now. So it's imagine like a soup lozenge that so instead you're too busy to eat a can of soup or you don't feel well enough to eat a can of soup you could just pop a lozenge and chicken noodle lozenge and enjoy that. Gunnar Hellekson: So gross. We were talking about this earlier. This is exactly the kind of thing that sounded like it made perfect sense on the PowerPoint presentation,… David Egts: Yes. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Checked all the boxes. David Egts: In the meeting. Yeah. Mhm. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah. Made sense in the meeting. until someone has to suck on their first soup drop and… David Egts: Yep. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: then the full horror of the idea sets in. David Egts: And so there was in the cutting room floor, so the takeout, they do a review of it and they basically said that it sounded like a great idea, but then it was basically sucking on like a salt pellet, that it was just like all salt and it just didn't do it for him. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah. David Egts: But… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. David Egts: if you go to the website, they say they're sold out. David Egts: So, don't know if that's good or bad, or it got recalled. Who knows? But Soup drops. and then, people are always trying to run Doom on things. somebody figured out… David Egts: how to run Doom on a Lightning to HDMI adapter. Gunnar Hellekson: Lightning to HDMI adapter. Gunnar Hellekson: How do you see what's going on? David Egts: HDMI. You plug it into a monitor. Gunnar Hellekson: I see. that's clever. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Okay, You can run Doom on anything. David Egts: And I was thinking Yeah. LA last time it was PDFs. David Egts: Now it could run it on a cable and I'm thinking It's an adapter. It just has wires, right? That it's mapping some pins to other pins and it's straight through. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Amazing. David Egts: But inside the cable there's like some microcontroller and the person was able to, hack the microcontroller, load Doom on it, plug it into a monitor and now it's this cable by itself can run Doom. Gunnar Hellekson: That's great. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: That's great. Yeah. David Egts: So, good stuff. Yeah. So we talked at least on one episode about the Madakascar hissing cockroaches at and then people were augmenting them right where it was Singapore's Nanyang Technical University also known as in Singapore they had the idea of hey a building falls on top of somebody we can get these little micro robots… Gunnar Hellekson: Yes. David Egts: but it's really hard to make the robots David Egts: ourselves. So, let's take a cockroach. We'll take over its nervous system with a microcontroller and then have the cockroach go in the rubble and identify where people are buried in the buildings. And that's great. And, we talked about that, but they've actually have taken it a step further where now that they can produce these cockroaches that are remote controlled. So now they can make one every 68 seconds. Gunnar Hellekson: I don't like where this is going. David Egts: Yeah. So here's how they do it. so they'll anesthetize the roaches with carbon dioxide. Gunnar Hellekson: Mhm. Yeah. Red. David Egts: Once they're incapacitated, they're secured to a platform by metal rods. And metal rods by itself, that was starting to sound creepy, right? 00:10:00 David Egts: you got your metal rods out from there. computer vision and deep learning scans each bug to identify the optimal implantation points for the wires, right? And then a robotic arm and a compact microcontroller is so using a robotic arm the microcontroller is attached to the roach and then once it's implanted the backpack's electrodes can electrically stimulate the bug's neurons to control its movements. Gunnar Hellekson: If we were this is like a horror film. David Egts: Or for the person with that has the cockroaches poured on him in the building. Gunnar Hellekson: You're making a great point. Yeah, that's right. nobody wins in this scenario. I think the cockroaches are out of luck and I think the unlucky recipient if I'm under What did they say? It was for rescue operations, going to get people under rubble and… David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: stuff like that. Okay, I'm trapped under the rubble of a building. David Egts: Mhm. Gunnar Hellekson: I don't know if I'm going to live or die. And… David Egts: Mhm. Gunnar Hellekson: then through the rocks crawl a Madagascar hissing roach with a camera on his back. That's not comforting. David Egts: Yeah. 5 to 7 cm typical is… Gunnar Hellekson: I don't feel like a All right. David Egts: how big they are. coming in to visit you under underneath the rubble. David Egts: And then you got the cockroach that is like, Sorry, dude. It's like I'm not in control here." and so the cockroach is freaking out, right? Because He's trying to get out of there, but it's not in control. So, right. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Listen, I don't want to be here anymore than you do. David Egts: But every 65 seconds you can crank out one of these babies. and they said that they did some outdoor trials and a squad of four cyborg roaches equipped with location trackers managed to collectively map 80% of a cluttered four square meter area within 10 minutes. All while being remotely controlled by their electronic backpacks. Gunnar Hellekson: got a lot of time on their hands over there at NTU. David Egts: Yep. Or a lot of cockroaches. so yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. David Egts: what are we going to do with these things? I don't know. yeah, so yeah. we got that. You can go check it out. and then remember when we've been talking a bunch of episodes about the brain organoids, the pig brains in the bucket that and… Gunnar Hellekson: Mhm. David Egts: then they bring them back to life and then they got the organoids that are starting to play pong. they taught them how to play pong by doing some neural conditioning. so now there are some researchers that figured out… David Egts: how to use hydrogels to play pong without any sort of organic material. Gunnar Hellekson: So completely mechanical in this way biology to it at David Egts: It's right. it's just hydrogels and then electrical stimulus and receptors. Yeah. and… Gunnar Hellekson: Get him. Mhm. David Egts: and so I actually downloaded the paper plugged into Gemini. It's like all right explain this to me. so hydrogels as we all know they're flexible by phasic materials that swell but do not dissolve in water. and so they have a lot of water. They could still maintain their shape and they have a lot of applications such as soft contact lenses. That's a hydrogel. David Egts: breast implants, disposable diapers, EEG and ECG, medical electrodes, whole bunch of uses for it. so these researchers, they were like, "Hey, they saw either the 2022 study about the dish brain or they listened to the podcast episode and got the idea, but they were like, "Hey, why can't we instead of using brain organoids and neurons physical animal neurons to play pong, can we get a hydrogel to play pong?" And the way they do it is that there are ionic charges inside of the hydrogels and those charges can move around inside the hydrogel. David Egts: And so the way they do it is that they'll have the ball the virtual pong ball converted to an electrical stimulation stimulate the hydrogel to tell the hydrogel… 00:15:00 Gunnar Hellekson: Mhm. David Egts: where the ball is and where it's going and then the ions will move around inside the hydrogel. And then I guess they use to read where the position of the ions are inside the hydrogel to move the paddle around. And based upon they were able to train the neurons like the dish brain ones that we talked about in the past. David Egts: they were be able to train it in 10 minutes, but with hydrogels, it takes longer. David Egts: It takes 20 minutes for it to do. but they're still able to teach the hydrogels how to play pong. and there's a video if you check out the website of you could actually see the pong being played by this hydrogel. Yeah, I got to double check that. Gunnar Hellekson: And… Gunnar Hellekson: and the video makes it look like it's playing pong at a normal human speed because you describe the process and… David Egts: I Yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: it feels like that process would take a while ions moving around in a hydrogel. seems like it would take longer than a kind of a human reaction time. You know what I mean? David Egts: I got to go back to the article. I think that video may be sped up, but I could be wrong. Gunnar Hellekson: All right. Okay. Super impressive. David Egts: still impressive for, not having any brain matter. being able to train hydrogel, just you're training water and ions to do something. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's cool. I love this. David Egts: Mhm. Yeah. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Save the organoids. Yeah. Yeah. So, Yeah. And imagine it's like then now you'll be able to get a PCIe card with hydrogels on it for training it to do stuff. So, who knows? Gunnar Hellekson: Move over organize. Gunnar Hellekson: That's every PCI card can be a soft actuator. David Egts: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, it's exciting. David Egts: And did that reminds me too speaking of liquids floating around and stuff and being attached to computers. Did you know that with random number generators it's really hard to do random numbers on a computer right… David Egts: because it's detministic. And so there's all kinds of tracks tricks and entropy and to make things happen. And did you know that SGI had a patent on using lava lamps to calculate random numbers? Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Really? Gunnar Hellekson: I didn't know that. Mhm. David Egts: Yeah. So, this goes back to, I guess the indie, back when it's like, hey, we have this workstation that includes a camera on it, which was novel back at the time. David Egts: And it's okay in order to calculate random numbers let's find something that is totally random and then they would point it at a bank of lava lamps and then the changes in the image from the lava lamps were used to come up with random number seeds and… David Egts: and there's I forget who it was cloudflare or somebody was they put it into production. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, I was thinking I was remember the lobby of a Yeah,… Gunnar Hellekson: it was like CloudFare or something has a whole wall of lava lamps with a camera in front of them and that's ostensibly what they're using to to generate the random numbers. Crazy. No,… David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. So that's those SGI people with the late nights with the lava lamps and who knows what else. But yeah, there you go. David Egts: Other ideas have you heard about or seen digital license plates? Gunnar Hellekson: I don't know what that is. David Egts: Imagine having your coobo or Kindle or whatever but an in display as your license plate. Gunnar Hellekson: Mhm. Okay. David Egts: So that there's a company they make these digital license plates and they sell them and there's a $29.99 monthly subscription fee for your license plate and it could display your license plate number. It could display other things. 00:20:00 David Egts: if your car gets stolen the license plate will say I'm being stolen so it winds up that there's a security researcher he figured out how to hack the digital license plates to basically replace the firmware of the digital license plate with a hacked set of firmware. So, you could change the display to have it say whatever you want. And it also sort of gets rid of the need to pay a $29.99 monthly subscription fee. And Yeah. Yeah. David Egts: And so it's like then the news that came out of it was that it's like the company that makes the license plates were like they asked to comment on it and they said that actually jailbreaking is a digital license plate to avoid tolls tickets and… Gunnar Hellekson: Okay. David Egts: other law enforcement devices would be a criminal act subject to prosecution by law enforcement. Okay. David Egts: And then yeah and then there they also added that the jailbreak technique identified by this researcher requires physical access of the vehicle plate plate removal specialized tools and expertise and u and this scenario is highly unlikely to occur in real world conditions limiting it to bad actors knowingly violating laws and… David Egts: product warranties which is something don't want to avoid warranties. yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. That's right. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's right. Mhm. David Egts: And then, they were also saying that if you remove the license plate from the car, it's actually going to send an alert to the owner of the car saying that the license plate was removed. but the researcher said that, that's okay. I could do some RF jamming to prevent that signal from happening. David Egts: And so then it just keeps spiraling, right? And then like you we've all heard about the evil maid attack, right? That goes in with the USB drives and hacks your computer in your hotel room, right? Now they're talking about the David Egts: what if you have the evil valet or the evil auto mechanic that surreptitiously sets up an RF blocking field removes your license plate changes the firmware on it and then they could have the license plate say different things that's not your license plate. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Right. David Egts: And… David Egts: I read this whole thing and I'm like, I don't want a digital license plate to begin with. I'm happy with a regular old license plate, but what's your take? Do you want one? Do you want to pay 30 bucks a month for the privilege to have a digital license plate that you could change it to say whatever you want? Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. No. Gunnar Hellekson: Care what's on other people's license plates. Don't care what's on my license plate. I don't need to solve. This is not a problem I need solved. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. yeah,… David Egts: Yeah. I'm just all the way down. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: what a phenomenal waste of human ingenuity. you have,… David Egts: Yes. Mhm. Gunnar Hellekson: by the way, you have the entire rest of the car to play with if you want to send a message or say something or whatever, right? yeah,… David Egts: Mhm. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: we don't This is Okay, put it away. We're done. David Egts: So, they were saying that it's like, the owner of the license plate could hack it and then that's a great way to get out of speeding tickets because you could have it changed to somebody else's license plate number,… David Egts: right, and stick them with the fine. or you have the evil mechanic or evil valet that will change the license plate number to say somebody else's license plate for whatever reason. but this is solving problems that nobody wants. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Or Yeah. David Egts: Yeah or… Gunnar Hellekson: That's I mean, or hear me You could spend five bucks at an Office Max and make a fake license plate to trick the traffic cameras. David Egts: you take it off of somebody else's car park next to your car. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's right. I mean, I've watched I mean,… David Egts: Yeah. Yes. Gunnar Hellekson: you watch a heisty movie and you know how to do this. This is not complicated, Just take the screwdriver you already own. David Egts: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: You have a new license plate. I don't know. I don't get it. What are we doing here? David Egts: Yep. Yeah. David Egts: Or you could make it magnetic,… David Egts: Where it's like so you want to drive fast, you could … Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Or get your James Bond style Rolodex license plate,… Gunnar Hellekson: . David Egts: that flips. Yeah. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: That flips over like that. Yeah. Mhm. David Egts: But meanwhile with license plates, there's a couple wired articles that so there's one guy it was a couple years ago how people get custom license plates do you ever do that or… 00:25:00 Gunnar Hellekson: No. David Egts: or care about that? Gunnar Hellekson: No. Never sprung for a vanity license plate. No. No. David Egts: Yeah, me neither. It's like I don't care. David Egts: But this guy got a vanity license plate that just said null so it led to it actually,… David Egts: he thought it would be a joke to have it be cause the license plate readers to break and pour up and… Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, little Johnny drop tables. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah, that's right. David Egts: So, it winds up that it created this computer glitch and he got thousands of dollars worth of fines. what happened then was that anytime there was a misreading of a license plate,… David Egts: it was set to null and it was matched back to him. So he got the fine. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Unbelievable. David Egts: So somebody else's car maybe it was unreadable the plate and then the software put null in there and then he got tagged with the license or… David Egts: with the ticket. David Egts: Yeah. and there's and I just Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Always clean your inputs,… Gunnar Hellekson: everybody. Always clean your inputs. That's terrible. David Egts: And it gets worse. I think she's 74 years old. There's a grandmother in New York State, big Star Trek fan. so she got a vanity license plate for New York State for her plate was NCC 1701 for the Starship Enterprise, Gunnar Hellekson: Mhm. Course. Mhm. David Egts: so fast forward to today, she doesn't even drive anymore and she doesn't even have that plate registered anymore. David Egts: But since it's in the New York State license plate system, you could actually go to Amazon, and I have the link in the show notes. You could buy a New York State license plate with NCC 1701 from Amazon for 14 bucks. David Egts: And so people were buying these plates and putting them on their car. And now this grandmother is getting stuck with all the tickets. Gunnar Hellekson: Right. Incredible. Gunnar Hellekson: Herald. Daryl. David Egts: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But yeah, I mean guess you could always like we always are keeping our enemies list. David Egts: If you get their license plate, you could send them the tickets, if you had the digital license plate, but don't do it with grandma's. Leave them alone. Gunnar Hellekson: No. Yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Leave the truck alone. David Egts: Yeah. Yeah. That's what I got. Yeah. So, if people need to go to Amazon and… David Egts: order their NCC 1701 New York license plate for 14 bucks, get some soup drops and a cover for a paper lake screen protector. Where should we be sending them? Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Mhm. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. They need to send their Madagascar hissing roaches to djshow.org. that's diaz and Dandgunners show.org. David Egts: Good stuff,… David Egts: Gunnar. It's awesome. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Yes. David Egts: So, it's we got to keep our eye out for the Progresso soup drops. I bet you they're going to show up my guess in airports, next to somebody wants some little bit of comfort food, instead of a tenna Altoids, I'll go with a grocery store near you. So yeah. Gunnar Hellekson: Yeah. Can't wait to sit next to somebody on the airplane smelling faintly of soup. David Egts: Soup breath. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Awesome. Gunnar Hellekson: All right,… David Egts: right, guys. we'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. Gunnar Hellekson: bye everybody.