Meeting notice: 10-06-98; 7:30 pm.

NE43-773 continues to be a wreck. We will therefore
meet as before at the Royal East (782 Main St. Cambridge; 
a block down from the corner of Main and Mass Ave.


Suggested Topic: Moore's law equivalents for NT.

One of most powerful forcing factors for innovation in
the computer industry over the last several decades has
been the success of the industry in finding features
whose improvements can be usefully graphed over long
periods. These include number of elements per unit area
(in lithography) and the cost of a given basket of
computation, memory, storage, and bandwidth in other
sectors.  Having industry-wide 'innovation clocks' like
these has proved enormously useful in defining,
organizing, and orienting both research and
development projects. It ensures that by the time
a company has reached a given point on the graph, its
various business partners will be ready for it.

It would be very convenient if we could develop
some sort of equivalent measure for NT but it is far
from obvious what that should be.  The smallest number
of atoms per operational structure? The largest number
of individually arranged atoms?  The cost of an act of
assembly?  The number of atoms that can arranged
individually per unit time?  None of these seems to fit
the bill as well the conventional Moore's law measures
do the needs of the computer industry.  Can we do
better?





Local Events:

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPLEX SYSTEMS OCTOBER 25-30, 1998
http://necsi.org/html/iccs2.html


News of Interest:

Molecular magnets
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/wi-ncomma.html
(Highly recommended.)

Earth bacteria spend three years on Moon, eager to return.
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast01sep98_1.htm

Fluorescent Nanoprobes 
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/lbnl-sntntifp.html

Defining Near-Neighbor Atoms 
http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/lbnl-techrevid.html


Announcement Archive:
http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

hapgood@pobox.com