The phenomenal (and probably phenomenological) surfer physicist Garrett Lisi manifested advanced creative physics at the TED conference. [Link]
Referencing the Large Hadron Collider, he tells us about the "whole zoo" of subatomic paricles, the 226 particles we know about, including simple particles like electrons and quarks, and their "second and third generation" relatives, which exist at much higher masses. He talks about the forces that effect each particle - the weak, strong, gravity and mass. A major hope for the Large Hadron Collider is that it will allow us to detect the Higgs Boson, which should give mass to other particles.Making motions
Lisi shows us force maps of particles, organized in terms of hypercharge and weak charges. They organize into symmetrical patterns - these symmetries are the result of projecting from 4D into 2D. "These pictures are not just pretty - they tell us what's allowed to happen." A great deal of progress has been made in physics by drawing these maps ad looking to see what's missing - broken symmetries often reveal particles that are supposed to exist.
Has Thane Heins, an inventor who dropped out of college, created a perpetual motion machine? [Link]
"It's hard for me to give an opinion," said Zahn, who admitted he was excited to see the demonstration. "I don't believe it will violate the laws of physics. You're not going to get more energy out than you put in."
He said it's easy for people to set up their tests wrong and misinterpret what they see. "You've got to look closely."
It's now Jan. 28 - D Day. Heins has modified his test so the effects observed are difficult to deny. He holds a permanent magnet a few centimetres away from the driveshaft of an electric motor, and the magnetic field it creates causes the motor to accelerate. It went well.
Contacted by phone a few hours after the test, Zahn is genuinely stumped - and surprised. He said the magnet shouldn't cause acceleration. "It's an unusual phenomena I wouldn't have predicted in advance. But I saw it. It's real. Now I'm just trying to figure it out."
Smart Drugs
Last week the LA Times ran a piece called "Drugs to build up that mental muscle." Smart drugs aren't new - nootropics were getting a lot of press in the 90s, e.g. John Morgenthaler in Mondo 2000 #2: "New Drugs That Make You Smart." I'm not thinking these drugs make you more intelligent. but they might make your cognition a little sharper and more efficient. (I'm not confusing focus with intelligence.)
UT Austin's ActLab, Sandy Stone's rogue subdepartment within the school of communications, was slashdotted – the fascination du jour being ActLab's current commitment to Weird Science. It's Dorkbot breaking into academia, putting up its feet, and smoking a cigar-shaped object.
A surfer named Garrett Lisi has come up with a unified theory of everything that appears to some to be viable. [Link]
The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
Denise Caruso: Intervention
I've been leading a discussion with Denise Caruso about her new book, Intervention. We're talking in the Inkwell conference on the WELL. Denise has written off and (currently) on for the New York Times. We've known each other for years - she used to cover Silicon Valley tech stories, but in 2000 she founded the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which is "not-for-profit research organization and consultancy that is dedicated to interdisciplinary and collaborative problem solving." Intervention is about risk assessment, focusing especially on transgenics and DNA hacking. We've been talking quite about about who should be assessing risk, and who should have authority for decisions about science and technology. If you want to ask a question or make a comment, and you're not a member of the WELL, you can send to inkwell at well.com. [Link to Denise's blog item about the discussion]
This is cool! Todd Lappin's posted images and video of vapor cones created by jets approaching Mach 1. In addition to the sonic boom, clouds may also form as this happens. Todd quotes the Astronomy Picture of the Day web site: "A leading theory is that a drop in air pressure at the plane described by the Prandtl-Glauert Singularity occurs so that moist air condenses there to form water droplets." [Link]
(I was going to embed the video, but you should go to the great Telstar Logistics site to see it... and take a look around while you're there.)
The earthsicle is melting, big wind is blowingI'd hate right now to be one of those scientists who're paid by oil companies to deny that the climate is changing. It's getting harder and harder to maike that case. This morning's news includes a report that there's less Arctic sea ice than ever in recorded history - which is not exactly news to those who've been paying attention; this was a story at Realclimate.org a week ago, and the New York Times also ran a piece. Meanwhile, on the effects-of-climate-change front, powerful Hurricane Dean is on course for Jamaica, and following that, Mexico near the Texas border, with 150mph maximum sustained winds and a terrible attitude.
Wikipedia entry for Sea Ice
New York Times series: "The Big Melt"
I ran across a web site about inventor Elmer Gates, who invented " the foam fire extinguisher, an improved electric iron, a climate-controlling air conditioner, and the educational toy “Box and Blocks.” He was productive in the fields of X-ray, alloy casting, electrically operated looms, and magnetic separation devices for mining."
He devised instruments for developing muscular skill; he created indoor replications of weather systems; in the late 1800s he invented an electronic music synthesizer. A 1904 Synopsis of his work listed thirty-five lines of inventive research in which results had been obtained. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Elmer Gates Laboratory in Chevy Chase, MD, was the largest private laboratory in the United States.
Evidently his inventions were just by-products of his focus on mental process. He had a process he called psychotaxis, "the integrated hierarchy of sensory discriminations required to create a valid and complete mental representation of a given part of the physical world."
Gates used psychotaxis to invent. First, he would experience through each of his senses every piece of sensory data that the subject at hand could impart, letting his mind classify each datum naturally according to its perceived likeness to or difference from the other data. Having thus acquired and categorized all the subject’s sensations, he would then, in psycho-taxonomic order, recreate each sensation in his mind—moving through the series over and over until he could execute it at great speed. This might take several weeks. Finally, he would work his way through the psycho-taxonomic hierarchy of sensory associations—which associations gave rise to images, concepts, ideas, and thoughts. Repeated recollection of the psycho-taxonomic hierarchy increased the blood flow to the areas of the brain where its data were enregistered and processed. This “refunctioning” brought into dominance those neurological structures through which subconscious connections were made. The result was new insights into the subject.Traveler's Dilemma
I've been reading a Scientific American article on "The Traveler's Dilemma", and I really don't understand why it's such a quandary for the author, Kaushik Basu, and various researchers who've studied this scenario. Here's how it goes:
Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.
Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty--the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44.
According to the article, game theory assuming backward induction predicts that each player will select "2." Studies show that nobody makes the predicted choice, which is supposedly the most rational, and this seems to puzzle researchers. However it seems obvious to me: if I was playing the game, my selection of a number would be driven by an assumption that an antique would have a value greater than the very low end of the set of choices. In reading the scenario, I assumed that the actual value would be closer to the high end of the range presented. I wouldn't have imagined making a selection based solely on logic with no consideration of actual value. I find myself wondering why the researchers miss this? When I got to the paragraph that says "game theorists analyze games without all the trappings of the colorful narratives by studying each one's so-called payoff matrix...," I thought the article was going to be about real-world choices vs abstract predictive logic, but it really wasn't. The article's conclusion sort of acknowledges that there are paths to rational choice in this context:
If I were to play this game, I would say to myself: "Forget game-theoretic logic. I will play a large number (perhaps 95), and I know my opponent will play something similar and both of us will ignore the rational argument that the next smaller number would be better than whatever number we choose. What is interesting is that this rejection of formal rationality and logic has a kind of meta-rationality attached to it. If both players follow this meta-rational course, both will do well. The idea of behavior generated by rationally rejecting rational behavior is a hard one to formalize.
However, there's never any mention of actual value as a driver for the game-player's decision.
A team of Italian scientists think they've discovered the impact crater from the Tunguska object (probably an asteroid or comet that struck Siberia in 1908). Lack of a crater has always been a bit of a mystery, given the power of the blast. The Italians suspect Lake Cheko, five miles from the probable epicenter. [Link]
Dr. Frankenstein, I presume?DNA is code, and where there's code, there's bound to be hackers. Welcome to the new world of programmable biology. [Link]
But SynBio engineers think they can take what we know and design and construct novel forms of life that are programmed to do practical things that couldn't otherwise be done. "We can now regard cells as 'programmable matter'," says Ron Weiss, a Princeton computer scientist who now writes genetic software for cells. Weiss is convinced that he will soon be able to "program cell behaviors as easily as we program computers."
No body farm
Texas State University learned that a lot of people don't want a body farm (i.e. a few decomposing corpses) nearby, but the real problem is all those buzzards flying 'round. [Link]
The Map of Science is a network map showing the relationships between 1.6 million scientific articles. The algorithm for the map was put together by Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack. At
the site you can click through to other maps showing analysis by geography, industry, institutions, and topics.
We may be more depressed because we're too "clean." [Link]
...it opens a new line of inquiry into why depression is becoming more common. Two other conditions that have increased in frequency recently are asthma and allergies, both of which are caused by the immune system attacking cells of the body it is supposed to protect. One explanation for the rise of these two conditions is the hygiene hypothesis. This suggests a lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs is leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.
In the case of depression, a similar explanation may pertain. If an ultra-hygienic environment is not stimulating the interaction between immune system and brain, some people may react badly to the consequent lack of serotonin. No one suggests this is the whole explanation for depression, but it may turn out to be part of it.
(Perhaps the real story here is that we've too successfully sealed ourselves off from the rest of the world/unverse, losing a sense of biological interdependence. This manifests in other ways, as too-hungry, too-warm polar bears will tell you.)
We're all Martians!Shades of Quatermass and the Pit (a British sci-fi serial from the 50s, later produced as a film), wherein we learn that the human race has Martian ancestry... a team of scientists speculate that life on earth began as microbes on Mars, blasted into space by a meteorite impact.
[Link]
A new life form, a kind of marine microalgae, popped up in seawater samples. The "represent a new evolutionary lineage," according to Fabrice Not, a marine biologist at the Institut de Ciències del Mar and one of the team that discovered what they're calling "picobiliphytes ."
[Link]
As someone getting into serious dieting, I appreciated wiseGEEK's What Does 200 Calories Look Like? – a real education. I should hang it on the wall or, better yet, have the image tattooed on my wrist. If you work mostly in your head, it's somehow easy to be unconscious about the stuff you're putting in your body.
Don't worry about those voices in your head....Psychologists say "hearing voices in your head is so common that it is normal." (But wouldn't that sorta depend on what they have to say?") [Link]
Good luck to scientists trying to solve "the mystery of genius"I think genius is about more than the pattern of electrical energy in the brain... and I was more fascinated by the revelation that the more intelligent brains are not more activce, just more efficient. [Link]
Mt. Merapi
I had a vivid dream that I was near an eruption night before last, no doubt because I'd been hearing that Indonesia's Mount Merapi was about to blow. Merapi's pretty cranky today, as noted by a CNN story about the evacuation of 11,000 folks from the area. The Merapi Observatory site has background info, and I found a video of Merapi from AP. Unfortunately there's no Merapi webcam (but you can book a Merapi tour.)
The Planetary society's funded the world's first optical SETI ("search for extraterrestrial intelligence") telescope at Harvard. [Link]
Alien civilizations are thought by many to be at least as likely to use visible light signals for communicating as they are to use radio transmissions. Visible light can form tight beams, be incredibly intense, and its high frequencies allow it to carry enormous amounts of information. Using only Earth 2006 technology, a bright, tightly-focused light beam, such as a laser, can be ten thousand times as bright as its parent star for a brief instant. Such a beam could be easily observed from enormous distances.(Alas, I'm still searching for terrestrial intelligence....) Hyperthymestic syndrome
"Hyperthymestic syndrome," based on the Greek word thymesis for "remembering" and hyper, meaning "more than normal," is the name coined for the condition of a woman referred to only as "AJ." She has a perfect memory. Absent-minded Jon L. is green with envy... [Link]
Heffalumps in Loch Ness
Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University's Hunterian Museum, might be called a "decryptozoologist" if he's right about the real origin of Loch Ness Monster sightings. Clark learned that circuses used to frequent the Loch Ness area, and they let their elephants swim in the Loch as a bit of R&R. Elephant's hump + trunk = Nessie. [Link]
... that lucky old sun got nothin' to do / But roll around heaven all day. [Link]
"This prediction of an active solar cycle suggests we're potentially looking at more communications disruptions, more satellite failures, possible disruptions of electrical grids and blackouts, more dangerous conditions for astronauts," said Richard Behnke of the Upper Atmosphere Research Section at the National Science Foundation.The ice is melting
Jim Hansen, the director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and Bush's top climate modeller, says the Greenland ice cap is melting even faster than scientists had feared, and "the implications for rising sea levels - and climate change - could be dramatic." This isn't surprising for those who've been attentive to the signs of global climate change for years now, but we don't often hear acknowledgement of the climate change scenario from scientists connected with the Bush administration, and Hansen offers insight into why that would be:
...a few weeks ago, when I - a Nasa climate scientist - tried to talk to the media about these issues following a lecture I had given calling for prompt reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Nasa public affairs team - staffed by political appointees from the Bush administration - tried to stop me doing so. I was not happy with that, and I ignored the restrictions. The first line of Nasa's mission is to understand and protect the planet.Hansen goes on to say that "we have to stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree. That will be warmer than it has been for half a million years, and many things could become unstoppable." As a matter of policy we have to focus on energy efficiency and renewables. We need energy policy driven by science, not by short-term economic interests and "faith-based initiatives." [Link] Dover evolves
The Dover (Pennsylvania) school board voted to drop a policy requiring a statement on "intelligent design," saying that the theory of evolution is "not a fact" and referring students to a book that promotes intelligent design as an alternative theory. A U.S. District Judge recently ruled that intelligent design is religious, not scientific; teaching it violates the establishment clause in the First Amendment. [Link]
Printing Organs
In a cool bit of convergent biotech, a project at the University of Missouri is experimenting with a method for "printing" organs based on a study of multicellular self-assembly. "The knowledge gained from these studies will serve as biological validation for new methods for building three-dimensional living structures of specific geometries....In the course of this project we anticipate that we will discover new principles of multicellular self-organization (morphogenesis, organogenesis), which in turn will enable us to develop functional biological structures for basic science purposes (e.g., in vitro studies of mechanisms of development and tumor formation), and applications such as targeted drug testing and delivery, and organ (module) replacement." According to Wired News, "they've made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer."
Here's how it works: A customized milling machine prints a small sheet of bio-paper. This "paper" is a variable gel composed of modified gelatin and hyaluronan, a sugar-rich material. Bio-ink blots -- each a little ball of cellular material a few hundred microns in diameter -- are then printed onto the paper. The process is repeated as many times as needed, the sheets stacked on top of each other.Bee flight
Once the stack is the right size -- maybe two centimeters' worth of sheets, each containing a ring of blots, for a tube resembling a blood vessel -- printing stops. The stack is incubated in a bioreactor, where cells fuse with their neighbors in all directions. The bio-paper works as a scaffold to support and nurture cells, and should be eaten away by them or naturally degrade, researchers said.
Bees can't possibly fly, they're too heavy to pull it off with those short wings. But they do fly, and an insect flight expert at Caltech has filmed bee flight in slow motion (5MB .avi) to figure out how it works. [Link]
Dickinson and his colleagues filmed hovering bees at 6000 frames per second, and plotted the unusual pattern of wing beats. The wing sweeps back in a 90˚ arc, then flips over as it returns an incredible 230 times a second. The team made a robot to scale to measure the forces involved. See a video of a bee in a flap, here (5MB, .avi format).
It is the more exotic forces created as the wing changes direction that dominate, says Dickinson. Additional vortices are produced by the rotation of the wing. Its like a propeller, where the blade is rotating too, he says. Also, the wing flaps back into its own wake, which leads to higher forces than flapping in still air. Lastly, there is another peculiar force known as added-mass force which peaks at the ends of each stroke and is related to acceleration as the wings direction changes.Darwin is controversialChristian fundamentalists have gained so much influence that a Charles Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of National History, essentially a mainstream science exhibit, is too controversial to attract corporate sponsors. However the Creationist Museum in Ohio has raised $7 million. I'm finding this (via Dave Farber's IP list) in the UK Telegraph – it's not getting reported in the U.S. I never once suspected that we could slide back to the dark ages, but that now seems very possible. [Link]
Transorbital LobotomyTransorbital lobotomy is pretty strange: the guy performing the procedure inserts an instrument similar to an icepick above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, then into the frontal lobes of the brain, then moves the "icepick" back and forth, disabling the frontal lobes. A psychiatrist named Walter Freeman used this procedure on 2500 patients with mixed results. NPR just featured a radio piece by Howard Dully, Freeman's youngest patient (victim?), now 56 years old. I heard the NPR piece, then checked out additional material at NPR's web site. Dully's story is fascinating and touching, a biographical account of his search for himself. This is a great story; if I was in film, I would be working up the "My Lobotomy" script.
Climate debate is heating upA few scientists may still question growing evidence of global climate change, others wonder if the evident warming trend signals something even more extreme, a catastrophic "super-interglacial" state. [Link]
They emphasize that within a century global warming will probably exceed the Eemian temperature maximum and thus obviate all the models that have made this their essential scenario. They also suggest that the total or partial collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a real possibility -- an event that would definitely throw a Younger Dryas wrench into the Gulf Stream.What's the real recipe for destruction?
If they are right, then we are living on the climate equivalent of a runaway train that is picking up speed as it passes the stations marked "Altithermal" and "Eemian." "Outside the envelope," moreover, means that we are not only leaving behind the serendipitous climatic parameters of the Holocene -- the last 10,000 years of mild, warm weather that have favored the explosive growth of agriculture and urban civilization -- but also those of the late Pleistocene that fostered the evolution of Homo sapiens in eastern Africa.Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy say that publishing the genome for the 1918 flu virus is a "Recipe for Destruction." Declan McCullach sent an excerpt of the article to his Politech email list, and got three interesting counter-arguments.
I would argue there are no "wrong hands" for information to get into. We are collectively responsible for situations that create the anger and misguided behavior that lead to mass destruction. My conclusion is that we (all humans) must recognize that technological instability requires us to make everyone (yes, everyone) a "right hand" for the preservation of the race. This conclusion will be forced on us whether people agree or not because of the power available through replicating destructive technologies.Let's just melt, then.
Getting everyone to play together and hide information will only work when all involved agrees to hide it. One person can spill the beans. Similarly, in a world where 1 person with 80kb of data, a biochem cookbook and 3 feet of lab space can create a tool that kills tens of millions -- we should all be working toward a world where *no one* wants to do that. We won't be able to stop individuals who can. (Jonathan M. Dugan, PhD, Stanford)The Arctic is melting, and it's melting fast. According to MSNBC, "scientists stopped short of directly blaming the melting trend on global warming but said they have few other explanations at this point." It's important to note here that scientists hypothesize rather than proclaim, which is why they "stop short." That doesn't mean that they don't think that the global climate is changing - it's obvious. Laymen will try to tie specific events to that change, but most scientists won't leap without more data, whatever they might suspect. (The Union of Concerned Scientists is a little more forthcoming: "Global warming is one of the most serious challenges facing us today. To protect the health and economic well-being of current and future generations, we must reduce our emissions of heat-trapping gases by using the technology, know-how, and practical solutions already at our disposal."
While we're here, I should mention the post at Realclimate yesterday on pseudo-scientist Michael Crichton's visit to the U.S. Senate, joining global warming skeptic Senator James Inhofe and hurricane forecaster William Gray in a parade of "half-truths and red herrings."
More on global warming and hurricanesFirst, let's be clear where there is agreement. Climate science doesn't deal in certainties - it deals in probablities and the balance of evidence. We agree with Crichton's statement that 'Prediction is not fact'. That certainly doesn't mean, however, that projections of possible future climate changes are not meaningful or useful, as Crichton claims.
Crichton seemed to imply that "prediction" (such as that provided by weather or climate models) is useless in the decision making process. (As an aside, we wonder how Gray, who is largely known for prediction of hurricane behavior based on (statistical) modeling, felt about this?). We fundamentally disagree. All science is about observation, understanding and prediction. When those predictions work, you make new predictions. When they don't, you revisit the observations, attempt to improve your understanding of the underlying processes, and make a new prediction. And so on. In the case of climate models, this is complicated by the fact that the time scales involved need to be long enough to average out the short-term noise, i.e. the chaotic sequences of 'weather' events. Luckily, we have past climate changes to test the models against. Even more to the point, successful climate predictions have actually been made in past Senate hearings. The figure at the end of this comment by Jim Hansen demonstrates that projections of global mean climate presented in a 1988 senate hearing (17 years ago) have actually been right on the money ...
Hurricanes either are or aren't affected by global climate change, according to a CNN article. Meteorologists are saying wild and woolly hurricanes like Katrina and Rita are part of a natural cycle that could last another decade or two. Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center in Miami sez "The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural fluctuations (and) cycles of hurricane activity driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along with the atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming," This is despite a study suggesting that global warming is making hurricanes "more ferocious." And CNN has a quote from that side of the aisle, too:
Brenda Ekwurzel, climate scientist of the Union of Concerned Scientist National Climate Education Program, told CNN that while global warming might not be causing hurricanes, it already is making them more intense.Conflating various facts and issues doesn't help, maybe we should decouple...
"We would never point to a single weather event and blame global warming," she said. "While hurricanes have bedeviled the Gulf Coast region for years, global warming is making matters worse."
As a somewhat well-informed layman, I accept those last two as fact, but it's okay with me if you want to challenge 'em. Whatever the case, I think we have enough data to confirm that the climate is changing, and we have to think about adaptation. "Katrina scenario did not exist"
- global climate change is a fact
- human impact on climate change is arguable
- impact of climate change on hurricanes is arguable
More Spin, mixed with a bit of historical revisionism: Michael Chertoff of Homeland Security simply denies that anyone had predicted a storm like Katrina and its impact on New Orleans. He says it was "breathtaking in its surprise," which is similar to Bush's statement that no one expected the levees would break.
When I was just a tad, I heard over and over how the evil Soviets would revise "history" regularly to fit the politics du jour, and this was considered a great sin and an indictment of communisim. Seems to be de rigueur for 21st century USA, however.
The good news is that CNN is calling bullshit on Chertoff.
New Orleans, state and federal officials have long painted a very different picture.Avian Flu Pandemic
"We certainly understood the potential impact of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane" on New Orleans, Lt. General Carl Strock, chief of engineers for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Thursday, Cox News Service reported.
Reuters reported that in 2004, more than 40 state, local and volunteer organizations practiced a scenario in which a massive hurricane struck and levees were breached, allowing water to flood New Orleans. Under the simulation, called "Hurricane Pam," the officials "had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed more than half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents," the Reuters report said.
In 2002 the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a five-part series exploring the vulnerability of the city. The newspaper, and other news media as well, specifically addressed the possibility of massive floods drowning residents, destroying homes and releasing toxic chemicals throughout the city.
Scientists long have discussed this possibility as a sort of doomsday scenario.The World Health Organization has been trying to prevent a global avian flu pandemic by sounding warnings and calling for action, funds, and the spread of information about the disease. We've all come to think of flu as a nonfatal disease, but flu can kill, and avian flu is particularly dangerous. Alex Steffen at WorldChanging.com is suggesting that bloggers sound the alarm this week, and call for "a bigger, wider and better debate about bird flu and its dangers."
Truth, madness, and logicOdd that Gödel, one of the three greatest logicians of all time, was also a paranoid schizophrenic. Barnard physicist and writer Janna Levin's writing a novel called A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, about which she says "This is a story. Does that make it fiction? It's based on truth like all of our stories. It's a story of coded secrets and psychotic delusions, mathematics and war. It's a chronicle of the strange lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. These stories are so strange, so incredible, that they are totally unbelievable. Except they're true. And fact is more extraordinary than fiction." Edge.org has an excerpt from the book.
Gödel didn't believe that truth would elude us. He proved it would. He didn't invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you'll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you're staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.Sunny Siberia!Get ready to adapt; Siberia appears to be melting, and if it is, the implications are far-reaching, according to an article in the UK Guardian:
It is a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures.According to the Guardian, "Western Siberia is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world....as it thaws, it reveals bare ground which warms up more quickly than ice and snow, and so accelerates" the rate of warming overall. Even worse, the Siberian bog could contain 70 billion tones of methane that could be released gradually as it thaws. Jamais Cascio discusses this in a piece at WorldChanging.com, noting that methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Jamais discusses possible mitigation via terraforming. Global Warming and Hurricanes Suspicions confirmed: global warming is making hurricanes "more ferocious," based on analysis of actual storms (rather than computer projections). [Link]"The total energy dissipated by hurricanes turns out to be well correlated with tropical sea surface temperatures," [climatologist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] said. "The large upswing in the past decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effects of global warming .... The damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future," Emanuel said.Note: Scientific American has an article exploring the possibility of controlling hurricanes. Elephants lost and foundSometimes what you think was lost was merely misplaced, even if it was an elephant. Conservationists assessing the near-disappearance of the wild elephants of Myanmar discovered them hard at work out of the wild, hauling logs. [Link]
Although the capture of wild elephants was banned in 1995, it is thought that people continue to round up animals that raid crops or otherwise bother humans. The group presenting in Brazil guesses that at present there are about 6,000 animals in human hands.Feynman Stamp
...
It may be that the elephants' usefulness in the logging camps is the best way to encourage locals to save the species, [Peter] Leimgruber [of Smithsonian's National Zoological Park] says. The animals do a good job, he adds, and cause relatively little pollution. "I'd rather have the forest logged by an elephant than by heavy machinery," he says.
A new postage stamp features the late physicist Richard Feynman along with some of Feynman's diagrams, drawings that "offered a means for visualizing the unfamiliar entities and their interactions," according to Science News.
Because these cartoonish sketches seemed to depict subatomic particles breaking the established rules of quantum physics, many eminent physicists were initially reluctant to adopt them. In the 1940s, some young theorists who embraced the tool had to meet in secret to learn how to use it to tackle formidable calculations.Question reality!
After only a few years, however, the approach caught on. "Feynman diagrams ... revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics," [MIT physicist and historian David I.] Kaiser says.The Universe is beyond our understanding, so we build a "middle world" of vernacular reality that just works, according to Richard Dawkins, speaking about "Meme Power" at TED Global. (I think a lot of us get this; my question is how we stretch?) [Link]
Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins.
We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued.
This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world - the medium scale environment - a world in which we cannot see individual atoms.
Because we exist in such a limited section of the universe, and given its enormous scale, we cannot expect to be the only organisms within it, Professor Dawkins believes.125 Questions: What we don't knowScience Magazine has published a list of the 125 "most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today." If you know the answers, feel free to post them here!
Deep Impact[Link] NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft will (if all goes well) rendezvous with comet Tempel 1 and send an impactor, collision with which will create a crater on the surface of the comet's nucleus. The idea is to take a look inside the comet's nucleus, and gather data about its composition. The timing's pretty cool – this'll be happening around the fourth of July. [Link]
The King Kong of flowersBig Bucky is a flower, called a Titan Arum (also called the "corpse flower" in its native Sumatra, because of its stench) that lives in a greenhouse at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. When it blooms, it releases a roadkill scent.
Botanists call the titan arum the "world's largest flower," but it really is an inflorescence, or collection of thousands of flowers. The titan arum are supposed to be rare and hard to cultivate, although researchers at UW-Madison have had four blooms on such flowers in the last five years.It last bloomed in 2001, and is set to bloom again any day now... botanists that hang out with this massive stinking flower hope it'll break the world's record of nine feet set by another Titan Arum in Germany. [Link] Global pandemic
The flowers bloom only about three or four times in their 40-year lives, when they slowly unfurl their green and purple spathe and release the stench, botanists say. This is the second bloom for 12-year-old Big Bucky.
The stench often is compared to road kill or rotting meat, and some visitors bring gas masks for protection. Fayyaz describes it as smelling "like a dead deer by the road that has been there for a few days" but says it's sweet to the beetles and flies that it attracts for pollination.The avian flu virus has been mutating and spreading, and could result in a global pandemic. [Link]
The danger of a global flu pandemic that could be as bad as or worse than the "Spanish influenza'outbreak of 1918-19 (which killed 40 to 50 million people, half of them young, healthy adults) comes from the fact that a strain of influenza virus that normally affects only birds can swap genes with a strain that is highly infectious between human beings. If people with the human type of influenza should also be infected with the avian type (through direct contact with infected poultry), the gene swap can easily occur -- and direct human-to-human transmission becomes possible. At that point, given current patterns of international travel, the world might be only weeks away from a global pandemic.No good deed goes unpunishedThomas Butler, a physician and scientist at Texas Tech University, couldn't locate 30 vials of plague specimens. He reported this to the safety officer at Texas Tech, who called in the FBI.
According to reliable sources, Butler was questioned by FBI agents without legal counsel which he waived, because he felt he had nothing to hide, he had worked with the military and federal agencies for years on this and other projects, and he genuinely wanted to help the FBI allay public fears. Testimony at the trial indicates that, after many hours of interrogation without sleep, and with the assurance that such interrogation would prevent any legal action, he signed a statement to the effect that the vials may have been autoclaved. He was then put in handcuffs and jailed, having been accused of lying to the FBI (a charge for which he was later acquitted). Jonathan Turley, an attorney for Butler and a professor at George Washington University School of Law, noted that "this made no sense. He would never have created a controversy to conceal the accidental destruction of vials". After being incarcerated for 6 nights in county jail without bail, Butler was allowed to post bail of US$100 000 (which was later increased to $250 000) but remained under house arrest, with electronic monitoring. He was not to contact colleagues who were on a witness list, and he had no access to his computer or e-mail for many months, despite having worked as Chief of the Infectious Diseases Department at Texas Tech University and having lived in Lubbock for 16 years, where he and his wife were raising 4 children and enjoying much respect in the community.
Butler was offered a plea bargain which involved pleading guilty to lying and spending 6 months in jail but declined and chose to risk trial by jury to clear his name. Although the original concerns of bioterrorism were not supportable, multiple additional charges largely unrelated to the disappearance of the vials containing _Y. pestis_ were filed (i.e., "piled on"), including illegal transportation of plague bacteria, tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud, for a total of some 69 charges carrying a maximum sentence of 469 years in prison and US$17 million in fines. Many of the charges had to do with contract disputes Butler had with his university (which are normally handled through civil, not criminal, proceedings) and were unrelated to the original charges associated with the disappearance of the vials. During the trial, prosecutors described Dr. Butler as an "evil genius" and compared him to "a cocaine dealer smuggling illegal drugs," and they emphasized the accusations of lying to the FBI and endangering the public and made repeated references to terrorism, actions many felt were designed to create an atmosphere of fear in the conservative West Texas courtroom.Remember, this was a respected research physician with an unblemished career and a history of responsible behavior. The story goes on to explain how most charges were dropped, but Butler was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison and required to pay $38,000 to Texas Tech University - this was questionable and it appears the judge might have suspended his sentence but was concerned that a suspension would result in an automatic federal appeal for an even longer sentence.
Can we help Butler's situation? All concerned individuals can help Dr. Butler and discourage misuse of current laws designed to defend us against terrorism by writing to members of Congress, to the Department of Justice, or to the newly confirmed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Dr. Butler's appeal is currently pending in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.. He has exhausted his personal savings and retirement funds. If you wish to assist his defense by providing expenses for his appeal, donations to the Thomas Butler Legal Defense Fund may be sent to Daniel C. Schwartz, c/o Bryan Cave LLP, 700 Thirteenth St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20005.Meanwhile, we should wonder what will happen the next time a scientist discovers that potentially dangerous materials are missing. What would you do? [Link]
The world shookThe Southeast Asian earthquake last December lasted ten minutes and shook the entire planet, according to this report... " the quake caused the planet to oscillate like a bell, at periods of about 17 minutes, which they were able to measure for weeks afterward."
ChimerasA new stem cell research project will create a mouse with a brain composed of human cells. This is one in a series of chimeras that scientists are developing as part of their research into potential cures for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. [Link]
Last week, however, the university's ethics committee approved the research, under certain conditions. Prof Henry Greely, the head of the committee, said: "If the mouse shows human-like behaviours, like improved memory or problem-solving, it's time to stop."Celestial BurperHe accepted that the project might seem "a little creepy", but insisted: "It's not going to get up and say 'Hi, I'm Mickey'. Our brains are far more complicated."
Those radio bursts from the center of the galaxy that astronomers have been monitoring "may have come from a previously unknown type of space object." [Link]
And on the seventh day he wrote a textbook....In Pennsylvania "Dutch country," they're teaching "intelligent design" as an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution. [Link]
Carol Brown and her husband Jeff both resigned from the School Board in protest.Cryptozoology's good yearThey are both Christians but also believe in the theory of evolution. They also fear that the introduction of Intelligent Design is part of a broader attempt to push creationism in schools.
Carol admits that there are gaps in Darwin's theory, but she says: "The theories that we teach the students have at least some physical evidence. Intelligent Design has no physical basis. It is a matter of faith."
Monster Quake
Loren Coleman reviews the year's top cryptozoology stories, including the much-blogged discovery of homo floresiensis, which lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 13,000 years ago. He also mentions the evidence for the existence of the six-foot Bili Ape, Bigfoot/yeti and lake monster news, and several discoveries of new animals (a shark, a tiger, a peccary, birds, and rodents, as well as a new species of macaque monkey. [Link]
A humongous earthquake 100 miles off the West Coast of Sumatra, 8.9 on the Richter scale, slammed southeastern Asia and killed
more than 4,80010,000 people via massive tsunamis triggered by the quake. Even more interesting, this is the second 8+ quake in a matter of days, the first being an 8.1 quake 305 miles north of Macquarie Island near Antarctica on December 23.This latest quake is the strongest since March 1964, and the fifth strongest since earthquake measurements began in 1899.
Update: The death toll keeps climbing, and CNN has set up a special Tsunami Disaster Section. Latest figure is 11,500 dead.
Mind HacksMind Hacks: Tips and Tools for Using Your Brain is an exploration of cognitive neuroscience. I haven't read it, but Mark's posted an interview with one of the editors. The book just has to be a great Christmas gift for people who have brains and want to play with 'em.
Entropy, Evolution, InternetJoi makes one of those posts that makes me wish I had more time to investigate – this one was inspired by a Susan Crawford post, and Susan was inspired by a Seth Schoen post about evolution and the second law of thermodynamics, which suggests that disorder in an isolated system will increase... the system will become less organized, more chaotic. Schoen's piece is about John W. Patterson's essay "Thermodynamics and Evolution," which challenges the creationist assertion that the second law contradicts or disproves the theory of evolution, because evolution suggests that order is increasing. Susan summarizes Schoen and Patterson, noting that increased order or negentropy is localized: "This local order emerges BECAUSE the outside area is becoming increasingly disorganized." If you've read Gravity's Rainbow, think of the banana breakfast, which represents enclosed, local negative entropy while the chaos of war goes on outside.
This is where I could take more time, because there's more to these three posts and their references than I have time to capture here, but also because I know there's confusion about the second law and the concept of entropy, and I've often thought that the second law is applicable to the state of the universe we perceive now, but I've wondered if reversal is possible, so that there's a kind of puslation, that disorder increases to a point, and at that point there's a reversal; order increases and disorder decreases. I can speculate about something like that because I'm not a scientist and I'm ignorant of physics, and that makes me wish I could know more.
Joi quotes Susan, and this quote ties her post to discussions about a free and open Internet, which many want, and many others fear:
Here is Patterson's conclusion:Thinking outside the brain"In reality, ... the 'uphill' processes associated with life not only are compatible with entropy and the second law, but actually depend on them for the energy fluxes off of which they feed. Numerous other kinds of backward processes in simpler, nonliving systems also proceed in this way, and do so in complete accord with the second law."
This all ties to internet governance. A sufficiently open net will tend towards order, not chaos -- and will do so on its own, with no external pilot.
Physicians at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin saved a rabies victim who didn't get the vaccine before onset of symptoms. This is the first such patient to survive rabies (others who survived had received the vaccine). Xeni posted about the case based on a submission from Xopl. Xopl heard the account on Minnesota Public Radio. He says "Apparently, rabies causes the brain to attack the body, and that is what causes death. By putting the girl into a coma he managed to stop the brain from being able to do any damage while the girl's immune system defeated the virus. This is a reminder that sometimes the impossible is possible if you don't listen to those who tell you otherwise." Great point: we have to step back and, as the Apple ads say, "think different." [Link]
Brain boostersFrom the Economist, a report on cognitive enhancers, or what we used to call "smart drugs." The conclusion is (natch) that drugs can improve memory and mental acuity but they don't necessarily make you "smarter" &ndash you can't remember what you never knew. I'm pretty sure they don't increase your intelligence (your ability to reason), either; I think that's a complex phenomenon that depends on more than the firing of synapses. The best news here is that a good-enough smart drug is readily available: caffeine.
Hybrid HumansWe all know that we have "beneficial bacteria" in our bodies, but scientists are thinking harder about the "commensal" relationship between humans and bacteria. Commensal relationships are similar to symbiosis, but in symbiotic relationships both organisms benefit. In commensal relationships, one organism benefits from another without damaging or benefiting it. We have more than 500 different species of bacteria in our bodies, and this leads some scientists to think of humans as superorganisms, or "highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells." [Link]
gut, they get very complex indeed. The information in the human genome itself, 3 billion
AIDS Conspiracy?Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, believes that the AIDS virus was deliberately created as a bio-weapon. This doesn't seem outlandish: scientists have worked on biological weapons for decades now; it's not a stretch to imagine that one might've "escaped." Don't know how you'd ever prove it, though, or whether it matters at this point, except as an argument to stop developing new weapons of mass destruction – and given human nature, I don't expect that argument would be particularly effective. [Link]
HurricanesLooks like Hurricane Jeanne will come in right behind Ivan, projected landfall is Sunday, probably striking Florida or the Gulf Coast. This series of four back to back hurricanes will strain systems - probably beyond the areas that are getting slammed. As one who's been concerned for several years about global climate change, I find myself wondering if this will be an annual problem and grow worse. It's certainly the sort of thing we've expected to see as an effect of warming trends and shifting climate, though on the other hand it's not unprecedented to have multiple hurricane strikes in a season, and there have certainly been hurricanes as intense as Ivan, Frances, and Charley. What's troubling is the proximity of storms, one right after the other, and the fact that each storm is high-intensity. Of course we're not thinking enough about mitigation yet.
Being Green in 2001At WorldChanging.com I posted a pointer to an interview with Dr. James White that I conducted as background for my Whole Earth Review article Being Green in 2001.
Prehistoric UtahKudos to Waldo Wilcox, a Utah rancher, and his family for preserving and protecting "a string of ancient settlements thousand of years old and in near perfect condition." Having acquire the land as part of a ranch they bought in 1951, Wilcox' family recognized the historical and scientific value of the site and ensured that it wasn't discovered, commercialized, overrun, and ruined, like so many other historic sites. Wilcox just sold the site to federal and state governments for $2.5 million. [Link]
The sites were occupied for at least 3,000 years until they were abandoned more than 1,000 years ago, when the Fremont people mysteriously vanished. The Fremont, a collection of hunter-gatherers and farmers, preceded more modern American Indian tribes on the Colorado Plateau.Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous OrderWhat sets this ancient site apart from other, better-known ones in Utah, Arizona or Colorado is that it's been left virtually untouched, with arrowheads and pottery shards still covering the ground in places.
"I didn't let people go in there to destroy it," said Wilcox, 74, whose parents bought the ranch in 1951 and threw up a gate to the rugged canyon. "The less people know about this, the better."
I haven't read this book, but from the review it's clearly one to track down and throw on the (growing) pile. [Link]
Two network phenomena are of special interest to researchers: synchronization and connectedness. Synchronization refers to the way in which networked elements, due to their dynamics, communicate and exhibit collective behavior. Connectedness describes the architecture of networks. For example, are there just a few highly connected "hubs" (think airline route maps) from which lots of short hops are made? Or is everything connected to everything else in a way that has no recognizable, simple structure? Connectedness is an important aspect of networks that determines, among other things, their efficiency and their vulnerability. We now know that many real networks are not random collections of nodes and links. Real networks are connected in special ways that have functional significance. Perhaps no one has been closer to the epicenter of the recent progress than Steven Strogatz, the author of the smart, carefully written, and fascinating account that is Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.The book includes content relevant to those of us who work with social networks:To my surprise, only at the end of the book does Strogatz devote a slightly short chapter to what is perhaps his most widely recognized work: the field of small−world networks. The prime example is known as "six degrees of separation," which refers to the parlor game in which one tries to link a given actor to a target (historically actor Kevin Bacon) through the smallest chain of movies sharing common costars. Strogatz describes how small−world networks are intermediate between regular and random networks. A few shortcuts that link random points in a regular network have a drastic effect on the connectivity: The average path length goes down significantly, while the local order in the network is hardly affected. Small−world networks have been found in numerous situations, such as in the nervous system of the worm C. elegans, the US power grid, and the Internet. But their influence is not always benign: Viruses and epidemics, for example, can easily spread globally.When Gravity FailsNASA and others have been researching antigravity or "gravity modification," evidently getting nowhere. Then again, why is the reporter surprised he can't get responses to emails about "black projects"? [Link]
Neurology of Religious ExperienceDr. Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal is studying brain activity related to the Unio Mystical – perception of mystical union with God – in Carmelite nuns. Preliminary data suggest that the experience is associated with a network of brain regions that deal with emotion processing and spatial representation of self. (Reminds me of similar experiments conducted with Buddhist Monks in the late 60s, described in Najanjo/Ornstein's On the Psychology of Meditation).
Dr Beauregard does not, in fact, believe there is a neurological God centre. Rather, his preliminary data implicate a network of brain regions in the Unio Mystica, including those associated with emotion processing and the spatial representation of self. But that leads to another criticism, which he may find harder to rebut. This is that he is not really measuring a mystical experience at allmerely an intense emotional one.Economist.com | Spiritual neurology
Physics LessonJoi Ito describes his lunch conversation with Seth Lloyd, an MIT Professor who is also associated with the Santa Fe institute and the study of complex systems. He's proposed a feasible design for a quantum computer. The lunch discussion was more about economics.
Seth pointed out that if you are struggling to survive in a tough environment, eating fatty and sweet foods and conserving your energy are probably good things. When you have enough food, sitting around eating sweets on the couch suddenly becomes detrimental. Is there an equivalent to this with money? I believe that free markets and democracy are great things and are the foundation of civilization and progress. I believe that efficiency and greed play a big role in creating healthy economies. Having said that, I do not believe that just because we have free markets and democracies, that people will be happy or that we will have peace. My question is, at what point, if any, do you have too much money? At what point is greed pointless and destructive? Can countries and economies become addicted to economic growth or become financially obese?They also talked about physics:
Seth explained that historically, physicists have always talked a lot about energy and the conservation of energy. Energy changed form, but there was always the same amount. They later found that you would lose a bit of energy over time and they attributed this to entropy. Recently, people have realized that entropy is sort of randomized molecules and looks a lot like information. Seth explained that the whole universe could be viewed as a big huge computer and you could apply information theory on physics and vice versa.Discussions like this suggest that we're beginning to grasp more of the mystery, yet the political and spiritual realities of the 21st century feel reactionary and unsatisfactory, as though we're resisting transformation. Joi's discussion with Seth raises questions - few answers so far.
(Mean while John Shirley will release a book about Gurdjieff in March. Gurdjieff saw our ordinary state of consciousness as sleeping, at least he used sleep as a metaphor for a lack of real awareness of our state and our condition. (Students of Gurdjieff will probably take issue with my simplistic rendering of one small part of this thinking, but I hope my interpretation is not too far off.)
Stay awake!
Friedrich Hayek Rocks!Kevin Marks was telling a bunch of us in social software discussions how important Friedrich Hayek's thinking had been, and since then I've had a too-low priority note in the back of my brain to look into Hayek's work. Forunately I've just stumbled onto a Boston Globe article clarifying the value of Hayek's thinking, which wasn't widely accepted in Hayek's time, the mid-20th century – but is like a road map for 21st century thinking. Though he was an economist, he theorized that the brain's activity is emergent, "arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals." And he understood the problem of knowledge management:
Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."Spirit Images from Mars
The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."
The first images show a vast desert landscape. [Link] Moore's Law is over?Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months or so, was bound to have a practical limit, and Intel scientists say we're almost there. [Link]
Five sci-fi scenarios...
MSN Tech & Gadgests has a slide show presentation of sci-fi scenarios "that will come true" : biometrics (already true), space tourism (already barely true), the holodeck (unlikely as shown on Star Trek, but VR environments using holography are likely), and domestic robots (already true, care to Roomba?) There's one more: "self-aware computers." That's what the headline says, but the text below says "...machines driven by artificial intelligence will, within 15 years or so, be handling many routine tasks." Hello? "Artificial intelligence" is not the same as "self-aware computers." Computers already simulate intelligence without being "self-aware." The whole self-awareness thing, Hal 9000 style, is extremely unlikely, though predicted by very smart people. Nobody's smart about everything, and my real difficulty with this is that we don't know enough about "awareness" to know how to create it in a computer, which is essentially a bunch of switches. How we get from switches that simulate logic via sophisticated human-generated programming to a state of "self-awareness" I don't get. If we make enough maps, and we make them increasingly sophisticated, do they become "the territory"?
