I finished Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age over the weekend. I'm several years behind, I know. It's not bad, and certainly a nice, imaginative exercise in what kinds of consumer goodies might be possible with omnipresent nanotechnology. That's all Stephenson's really any good for, though — leaps of imagination. Take some neat toys, throw them into a world in which all of our contemporary power structures have been subverted or transformed and Asian culture is ascendant. Then add some completely inscrutable characters. Four hundred pages later, conclude abruptly.

Which is fine. I like that stuff. But Stephenson should really spend an afternoon with Physics for Dummies. Energy seemingly comes from nowhere and for free; impossibly large amounts of it get stored in impossibly small spaces; a novel but pointless blood-based computer network is introduced but never justified (Stephenson seems obsessed with STDs); and he blithely declares that humans aren't Turing machines (or more precisely, can't be simulated by a Turing machine). If it was wrapped in even a little pseudoscience I'd be fine with this groundbreaking result being a central part of the story, but the justification basically boils down to "computers don't want to have sex with teenage girls". Searching for the apotheosis of that ineffable quality that defines our humanity? Look no further than the pages of Barely Legal.

And then there's this, which I first saw over at Articulatory Loop, and then at Slashdot. It's a urine-powered battery. Well, urine-powered in the same sense that your car's battery is water-powered. Really, nearly any liquid would do, including urine, if you really insist on it. The liquid just provides a medium for electron transfer between two dissimilar metals, not any of the system's energy.

Look, I'm as anxious to be brutally subjugated by robotic overlords as everyone else. But until we see how that eventuality actually unfolds, let's keep things plausible.