What's up with this?

> I checked on the link and they are in Upstate NY. Maybe Paul has
> something to do with this? ... One of his students? Paul?
> http://www.stardrivedevice.com/

Never heard of them before. Like their logo though! (We also used a
centaur logo variant, but a non-violent one:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/ )

Personally, I do think it possible people could eventually tap zero
point energy http://www.zpenergy.com/ or create matter from empty space
(such as might explain the spontaneous creation of matter indicated
here: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm ). But I would think energy
and matter creation might, rather than EM manipulation, take nanoscale
engineering (a variant of the Casimir effect which produces particles)
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/9/6
or being able to interface directly with the nature of reality (kind of
like a program doing an API or interrupt call on a CPU) -- maybe like
through Jack L. Chalker's "Well of Souls" computer.

Still, it's theoretically possible if the universe is a simulation (see
Edward Fredkin,
http://www.pcs.cnu.edu/~gwebb/fredkin.htm )
and we are data sprites (perhaps run as an Omega Point ancestor simulation,
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/ )
that a properly configured electrical generator might put out some sort
of special signal that is picked up by the universe simulating computer
and interpreted in a special way on which you could then encode
information which might be interpreted symbolically by that computer...
:-) Perhaps this would be a left over from a debugging hack? Or it might
be a backdoor put in by others who went before us?

I've thought of writing an book explaining the magic in the Harry Potter
Universe on this basis -- wizardish people discovered a debugging back
door and then hacked the universe in various ways such as when you wave
your specially configured wand (which the universe computer recognizes
symbolically as a gestural dataport) and say "lumos" (which the universe
listedns for in conjunction with a wand gesture), then light appears,
for example. As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic".)

Note that our own technology is rapidly progressing that way, and, for
example, contracting at IBM Research a long while back I worked on a
project called the "Personal Speech Assistant" intended in some way to
ultimately allow human speech through an intermediate device to control
one's surroundings (such as via X10 type activities).
http://www-1.ibm.com/industries/wireless/doc/content/resource/technical/296625104.html
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/r/rameshg/comerford-icassp2001.pdf
However, our approach did not require using any undocumented universe
altering APIS (unlike the stardrive web site) -- we were just using the
standard documented Physics 101 universe altering APIs. :-)

As for their specific craft, well, let's see it fly! (Personally, I'd
rather invest in PV though: http://www.solarbuzz.com ) Anyway, even if
it was nonsense, it might be a fun read. Years ago I paid top dollar as
a kid for the detailed deck plans of the Star Trek Enterprise, and
certainly got my money's worth studying them in fun (plus I learned they
supposedly cleaned uniforms by disassembling them at one end, removing
dirt from the fibers, and reassembling the uniforms at the other --
imagination stretching!) I have to admit to just loving these sort of
detailed plans (even if filled with handwaving and black boxes...)

--Paul Fernhout