Mind Benders

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 05:32:06 GMT

You know you want to think the big thoughts. Here's some fuel, some food for thought. A New View of Our Universe: Only One of Many Many Universes, Several Theories Or perhaps the very small thoughts? Smile, Electron! Fast 'Camera' Captures Action Or, a little closer to our frame of reference, consider what we don't know about sex, gender, and sexuality: The Ambiguities of Sexuality [all via the New York Times]

Cyborgs 'R' Us

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 20:42:02 GMT

What's your sign, baby?
Never mind, I already know just by shaking your hand.

TWO Japanese telecoms giants have developed technology that turns the human body into a broadband-paced link that allows e-mail addresses to be exchanged through a simple handshake, a report said Monday....

Is that a PDA in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

Apparel and handbags have their own conductivity, allowing an electrical connection to a PDA that can remain in one's pocket, the paper said.

Yeah, man, we just had this, like, instant connection!

The companies have confirmed in an experiment that data can be transmitted at 10 megabits per second, comparable to the speed of a broadband Internet connection, it said.

Hey boss, I finished that report you wanted, but I can't give it to you because the doorknob to my office just crashed.

The technology could allow data communications through door knobs, switches, desks and chairs, the paper said.

Soon we'll all be on the hot seat. Read more about it.

If I only had a brain...

Sat, 28 Sep 2002 19:47:42 GMT

... for math. I had a lively discussion with my brother this morning about Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. He asked me to explain the main concepts. I did my best. As he's quite mathematically adept, I urged him to read the book himself. My brother is a very creative thinker, and I suspect it would inspire him to have all sorts of interesting ideas ~ which I'd like to hear about later myself. In the meantime, the New York Times reviews a book called Strange Matters by Tom Siegfried that sounds as if it might be up my street. It contains a sentence that sums up my Math Envy:

Finally, theoretical physics has become a refined form of creative play, in which testing out wacky ideas mathematically continually outruns experiment. Sometimes it outruns experiment so far the ideas are barely testable even in principle, but that doesn't stop it being enormous fun for those intellectually equipped to play the game.

Now here's a beauty contest I can get behind!

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 05:19:18 GMT
Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments...
Most of the experiments ~ which are listed in this month's Physics World ~ took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator. What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear.

Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference
Galileo's experiment on falling objects
Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes
Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism
Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment
Young's light-interference experiment
Foucault's pendulum
Millikan's oil-drop experiment
Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus
Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons
I have to admit that I was less than familiar with 2 of these. How about you? You can read up on them in the New York Times article.

Get out your shades, baby...

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 10:27:20 GMT
...you'll be needing them to see the polarized light from the Big Bang. And that glare is the "star power" of the inflation theory of cosmology getting another piece of evidence chalked up in the Yes column. The New York Times reports on the results announced by astronmers from the Universities of Columbia and California .
"We're stuck with a preposterous universe," Dr. Carlstrom said. Two papers describing the work will be posted on the team's Web site, astro.uchicago.edu/dasi, he said. Other cosmologists responded with a mixture of glee and relief, saying it would have been bigger news if the polarization had not been found. "If you had any doubts that this radiation is from the Big Bang, this should quash them," said Dr. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago.
Next up: more powerful polarized telescopes that will actually be able to see the distortions (gravitational waves) in space-time caused by inflation, if it occurred, in the first thirty seconds of the universe's existence. We'll need some new telescopes and satellites for that. (I expect the shape of the number "42" will be especially difficult to make out.)

The Other Half

Thu, 19 Sep 2002 16:33:31 GMT
I love physics. How cool is this?
Physicists working in Europe announced yesterday that they had passed through nature's looking glass and had created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. Such experiments, theorists say, could test some of the basic tenets of modern physics and light the way to a deeper understanding of nature.
This is fascinating, if arcane, stuff. Using an ingenious sequence of "catching" and "mixing" traps made of magnetic fields, the scientists superimposed clouds of anti-protons and anti-electrons. Although they couldn't observe the the anti-hydrogen directly, the characteristic signature of its destruction was evident as the atoms collided with the regular matter of the chamber's walls in a shower of pions and gamma rays. Can we fire up the warp core now, Scotty? [via The New York Times]

Giant Earth Fart: Party Prank Gone Horribly Wrong?

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 02:58:24 GMT
On June 30, 1908, a large segment of the Tunguska forest in Siberia experienced some kind of spectacular explosion. Trees were flattened, and there was a major conflagration. The force has been estimated as the equivalent of a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb. The most popular scientific explanation has been a meteorite impact. (Other theories include aliens and so forth.) Now, in charmingly imperfect English, we read a Siberian scientist's alternate theory.
The scientist assumes that the gases associated with the oil deposits, and methane produced in the depths of coal beds were accumulated under a thick cover of basalts and then they broke free one day.... The gas kick started nine days prior to the major explosion, a narrow jet of gases rushed up southbound. The fluid jet from under the earth was accompanied by dust, and the wind carried the dust to the west. In the upper layers of atmosphere a layer of aerosols was formed. This layer charged with electricity could have produced the fatal 'sparkle'. It put on fire the top of the liquid jet, and the fire ball rushed towards the Earth. In the oxygen saturated layer of atmosphere the fire ball exploded, the blast wave stirred up the ground, and the gas discharge ceased.
[via Dozer Online]

No more stick-ups

Tue, 03 Sep 2002 18:17:46 GMT
Diabetics get sick of needles. Of course they do, they have to stick themselves to check their sugar levels, they have to stick themselves to deliver insulin. It's no fun. Just in time for Generation Y ~ the dayglo low-sugar warning tattoo:
The tattoo has been designed Gerard Cote, of Texas A&M University, and Michael Pishko, of the chemical engineering department at Penn State University. It is made of polyethylene glycol beads that are coated with fluorescent molecules. Because glucose displaces the fluorescent molecules, the level of fluorescence is high when bodily glucose levels are low.
The only catch is that the tattoo has to be somewhere where the sun don't shine (too much, anyway). I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of integrated biofeedback technology.

Circuit to Computer: 'Come in, please!'

Mon, 02 Sep 2002 21:51:55 GMT
Using a computer-based genetic algorithm (selecting for an attribute after "mutating" variables), scientists trying to evolve a oscillator circuit managed to create one that turned into a radio receiver... serving up a nearby computer's signal as output.
Paul Layzell and Jon Bird at the University of Sussex in Brighton applied the program to a simple arrangement of transistors and found that an oscillating output did indeed evolve. But when they looked more closely they found that, despite producing an oscillating signal, the circuit itself was not actually an oscillator. Instead, it was behaving more like a radio receiver, picking up a signal from a nearby computer and delivering it as an output. In essence, the evolving circuit had cheated, relaying oscillations generated elsewhere, rather than generating its own.
And despite not being explicitly selected for, the circuit had also grown itself an "antenna." This just tickles me. It's somehow anxiety-provoking too. (Sometimes nature doesn't ask, "Would you like a side of fries with that?" ~ sometimes you just get the Meal Deal automatically.)

I wanna be...

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 22:40:54 GMT
...your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Or woman. Whatever. From The Globe and Mail:
Gecko feet are covered with millions of tiny setae, hairs only twice as long as a strand of human hair is wide. Each seta has 1,000 tiny pads on its tip, a tip that is so small it is below the wavelength of visible light, only 200 billionths of a metre wide. Studying the Tokay gecko, a native of Southeast Asia and one of about 800 species of the lizard, the team believed that it was the size and shape of the foot hairs that determined a gecko's ability to adhere to a surface, not what the hairs were made of. They then used that knowledge to create synthetic foot-hairs from two different substances. "Both ... stuck as predicted," says lead researcher Kellar Autumn, assistant biology professor at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College. "Our results provide the first direct experimental verification that ... van der Waals force is definitely what makes geckos stick."
Oh, and I'm not the only one:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Pentagon, has supported the research, though it has not revealed any plans it might have for it.
DARPA: yesterday the world wide web, tomorrow the spiderweb! [via Boing Boing, by way of Craig]

You can pick your nose, and you can pick your children, and now you can pick your children's nose...

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 01:11:21 GMT
In a review of Redesigning Humans the NY Times quotes the author, Gregory Stock:
Stock's overarching claim is that germ-line modifications will ''write a new page in the history of life, allowing us to seize control of our evolutionary future,'' an echo of the classic eugenicist dream. New technologies will allow humans to make fundamental alterations to their individual genetic compositions and those of their children. The net effect, he says, will be to draw ''reproduction into a highly selective social process that is far more rapid and effective at spreading successful genes than traditional sexual competition and mate selection.'' In the future, he claims, we will be ''much more than simply human.'
I fail to see how anyone can argue with a straight face that allowing rich people loose in the human genome is going to improve the species at an accelerated rate. What, pray tell, counts as "successful" to those folks? Big breasts? Height? Intelligence? Alpha-instincts? What? With luck, natural selection will just have a bunch more mutations to choose from. Without luck, we'll all end up with snub noses because Richy Rich thinks they look better, and you know what a trend-setter he is. The good news is also that I think we're a long way away from really understanding what does what at a fine level in the genome. The bad news is that our ignorance won't prevent a whole bunch of people from mucking about with it anyway. The results are bound to be messy much of the time. (Can anybody say "thalidomide"?) I do agree with Stock that this change is coming. I hope that, initially, we can find a way to legislate that it be used only to cure genetic diseases, not to "enhance" or "tinker," at least for some appropriate moratorium period, while we try to get a grip on what it is we're actually doing.

The Future is Coming

Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:26:35 GMT
... and it's riding on the backs of mice.
The technique, in which bits of testicular tissue from newborn pigs and goats were grafted onto the backs of mice, could also provide an unprecedented window through which scientists may watch the mysterious process by which sperm develop in various species -- including humans. Indeed, several experts predicted yesterday that it won't be long before human sperm are grown in mice -- an advance that scientists and ethicists said could lead to both useful and troubling scenarios.
Mentioned in passing in this article from the Washington Post is the fact the host mice are a special breed whose immune systems have been rendered incapable of rejecting foreign tissue. They're already Frankenmice. And there is some concern about the possibility of interspecies contamination:
"Does that mouse have viruses or something that will infect the human cells? Are we going to have 'mad mouse disease'?" he asked, a reference to the surprise discovery that the infectious agent behind mad cow disease can also, if consumed, destroy human brains.

Common Sense on Cloning

Wed, 14 Aug 2002 20:03:25 GMT
I've never really understood the hysteria around the issue of human cloning. Wait. Let me restate. I think it's perfectly reasonable to vehemently oppose human cloning for the purpose of harvesting organs, creating slaves-soldiers-workers, or in general turning a human being into a means for someone else's ends. Human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves. But aside from exploitation (and let's face it, people have been reproducing to create little slaves for their own purposes from time immemorial), I can't subscribe to any of the objections. 1. "It's not natural." Neither is 99% of our culture. The same objection was raised to every advance in science and medicine. Hey, lots of the biomass on the planet reproduces asexually, essentially cloning itself itself. Feh on this argument from nature. 2. "The clone will never be able to have his or her own identity." Unlike all those "natural" children raised in dysfunctional families who had to live out the lives, fantasies, or phobias of their parents? If identical twins can manage to have a sense of self, so can a clone. At the very least, they'll know they were really wanted. 3. "Anyone who wants to be cloned is a horrible egotist and would make a lousy parent." As opposed to all those perfect parents out there who procreate for only the most pure and righteous of reasons? Helloooooo? What world do YOU live in? Any pair of fools with functional gonads can create a child, and they do. We don't require a license for them. We don't require them to study good parenting. We don't watch them like hawks to be sure they are raising their children in a sane and healthy manner. (We could have another discussion about whether we should.) I think it's quite likely that the parent of a clone will treat that child pretty well ~ after all, it should be even easier to be empathetic. 4. "It will cheapen the miracle of human life by making it more of a market commodity." Gene tailoring is coming. Like it or not (and I'm inclined to NOT like it, except for eliminating identifiable diseases). The biggest surprise awaiting the first person to be successfully cloned will be how very different the new child is. Individuality does not reside in DNA alone, but in a complex interaction that commences at conception and may or may not end in the grave. Wired News has an article about Randolfe Wicker, a man who speaks sense about cloning.

Today it's Grace...

Thu, 08 Aug 2002 05:23:27 GMT
...tomorrow it's Stephen Byerley (or Roy Batty). You can read about the first baby steps towards either our Asimovian or Dickian future in this article from the New York Times.

Polio Home Brew

Fri, 12 Jul 2002 06:41:14 GMT
My ex-boyfriend A- is a molecular biologist, so I've known for a long time that scientists with skillz can cook up a whole banquet of lethal dishes in the lab. Pandora's box is well and truly opened. Now everyone else knows it too.

I want to live another 50 years...

Fri, 05 Jul 2002 05:20:45 GMT
... because I want to live long enough to see Strong AI become a reality, and because I want to see whether the Singularity happens or not. (I think that Kurzweil severely underestimates the difficulty of reverse-engineering the human brain/mind.) Nevertheless, given our difficulties in comprehending the humanity of other human beings different from ourselves, or accommodating the sentience of other species with whom we share the planet, what are the odds that we will treat our new siblings, the Strong AIs, with the love and respect they'll be due?

Bigger is Much Hotter

Tue, 25 Jun 2002 22:31:18 GMT
*Get your mind out of the gutter!* Bigger is definitely hotter, but not necessarily better. Sometimes small and nimble and cheap is good. Q and Green Destiny are the respective champions in the debate. The bottleneck in parallel processing is communication speed, getting information from one part of the machine to another in a timely fashion. Do it with proximity and you get heat and huge energy consumption to keep things from melting down. Do it with fiber cable and things stay cool but slow way down. Bring on the quantum computing lasers!

Giving New Meaning to the Term 'Assisted Living'

Mon, 24 Jun 2002 23:46:15 GMT
Why waste valuable wage-earners' time taking care of elderly, forgetful Mom or Dad, Grandma or Gramps, when you can get a handy-dandy AI in a box to do it?

Another Piece in the Puzzle

Sun, 23 Jun 2002 18:35:17 GMT
I'm thinking that this book, Linked: The New Science of Networks by Elbert-Laszlo Barabasi, should be sold in a matched set on Amazon with Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. We're going to see this convergence more and more often as time goes by ~ we're at the right place technological, socially, and economically to start thinking about networks in this way. The algorithmic, rules-based functioning of DNA is just the tip of the iceberg. A New York Times article points to economics as another area where the exploration of network theory might be valuable. I'm going to propose that it's already started with applications from game theory (see John Nash, for example).

Write Your Own Ticket?

Tue, 11 Jun 2002 21:05:36 GMT
Don't look now. The future is charging up on us in the most alarming ~ the most exciting ~ way. One of the major obstacles to building molecular-sized biomachines looks like it's been overcome, at least for some applications. Scientist Chad Mirkin and his colleagues have turned an atomic-force microscope into a 21st century quill pen, which "dips" into DNA ink and can write onto a variety of substrates. This Wired article has more.

Last words from Gould...

Sun, 02 Jun 2002 04:27:03 GMT
This interview could make a person melancholy. Stephen Jay Gould talks about books he plans to write, religion, and pattern.
My first book, ''Ontogeny and Phylogeny,'' was about organisms. My new book is about theory. I need to write one about pattern, which I think will be called ''Life's Direction.''...

[Q]: ...many people associate you with the idea that there may not be as much pattern in the world as we think.

A lot of the patterns we see are entirely contingent. Most of them would not be repeated if we could just start everything over again.
I'm really sorry that we'll never get to read SJG on Wolfram. If I read others' interpretations correctly (having not yet got my hands on a copy myself), the gist of "A New Kind of Science" is that both pattern and complexity must arise out of some of the simplest processes. This would seem to be an argument for the ubiquity, even inevitability, of life. For more on Wolfram: "1,197 pages I'm going to have to read...", "Life, the Universe, and Everything".

Another Intersection

Thu, 30 May 2002 04:57:27 GMT
Bioinformatics, meet AI; AI, may I introduce Bioinformatics? This was a convergence made in heaven. DNA, cellular function, biological pathways ~ this material is by its nature (no pun intended) chock full of information. Too much information, in fact, for our tiny minds to juggle meaningfully. We will inevitably have to depend on computational assistance, and ultimately perhaps even intelligences other than our wetware to make sense of this stuff. Even if Stephen Wolfram is right, and the program for the entire universe can be expressed in four lines of relatively simple code, we still are temporal creatures living our experiences within a computational process way too vast and too swift for us to simulate out in front of it. (I think this is actually one of those aleph order of infinity / recursion problems. Or do I mean fractals? Anyway.) So what anti-entropic sense we can bring to local problems may well have to be done using our entire toolbox ~ abstract mathematics, brute force computation, process simulation, neural network categorization, and maybe even the Cyc model of expert AI. For more on Wolfram: "1,197 pages I'm going to have to read...", "Life, the Universe, and Everything".

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Tue, 21 May 2002 05:47:19 GMT
I've just read an article which hits almost all of my intellectual hot buttons: cosmology, artificial intelligence, origins of life/evolution, relativity, particle physics, pattern recognition, complexity and randomness, determinism and free will, Turing machines, networks, consciousness (it doesn't cover beauty, ethics, language, or God explicitly so at least some topics are left for another day). I heard for the first time about "digital physics." The density of cool ideas in this review by Ray Kurzweil of the "1,197 pages I'm going to have to read..." (aka Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science") is stunning. I suppose that's what you get when one of the leading thinkers about the future covergence of computation and biology reads something that really challenges his mind. Dang! I have genius envy.
P.S. Stephen Jay Gould, thank you and RIP.

Pascale Soleil: artificialNature

Mind Benders

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Movie Physics

Cyborgs 'R' Us

If I only had a brain...

Now here's a beauty contest I can get behind!

Get out your shades, baby...

The Other Half

Giant Earth Fart: Party Prank Gone Horribly Wrong?

No more stick-ups

Circuit to Computer: 'Come in, please!'

I wanna be...

You can pick your nose, and you can pick your children, and now you can pick your children's nose...

The Future is Coming

Common Sense on Cloning

Today it's Grace...

Polio Home Brew

I want to live another 50 years...

Bigger is Much Hotter

Giving New Meaning to the Term 'Assisted Living'

Another Piece in the Puzzle

Write Your Own Ticket?

Last words from Gould...

Another Intersection

Life, the Universe, and Everything