Snips of Science, Tech and Politics

Occupy the skies!

Think I'm kidding about "sousveillance" and people-power vision? Now citizen protesters have drones!

This video shows the view from a Polish RoboKopter with video camera. Getting an aerial view is the next step in compelling DIY citizen video.



== Antimatter and FTL Neutrinos? ==
 
The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.  This could alter our understanding of matter and anti-matter...or provide a clue to why our cosmos is only made (largely) of one kind.

And yes, there’s been a lot of interest in the recent neutrino experiments in Italy. Does a recent result that replicates the “faster-than-light finding” actually prove it??

Well, I remain skeptical.

1- this new result comes from the same pair of facilities in the alps and Italy; it's not a confirmation.

2- it's very hard to synch the clocks.  Show me you’ve done that and measured the distance properly.

3-  if neutrinos traveled FTL with any consistency they would have arrived months before the light from supernova 1987a, instead of right on time. A hundred thousand light-year journey. Any systematic exceeding of the speed of light would be noticed!

One suggestion that would explain the 1987a results, yet allow something anomalous over the very short, initial distance from Switzerland to Italy? It’s been suggested that perhaps some neutrinos bump out of our "brane" just after being made, then settle back in and travel normally. Very sci fi-ish idea.


== Tax Evasion and the IRS ==

The IRS has opened new enforcement offices overseas, beefed up staffing and expanded cooperation with foreign governments. A similar disclosure program in 2009 has so far netted $2.2 billion in back taxes, penalties and fines, from people with accounts in 140 countries.

Between the two disclosure programs, a total of 30,000 tax cheats have come clean. "The world has clearly changed," IRS Commissioner Shulman said. "We have pierced international bank secrecy laws, and we're making a serious dent in offshore tax evasion... Unlike a few years ago, it's very clear now that there's a real price to be paid for people who think they can hide offshore and not pay their taxes."

You’ll be hearing the “class war” refrain for years. Gather some capsule, one-sentence answers:

* Across 6000 years, 99% of human cultures were pyramid-shaped, and the owner-lords were the ones who oppressed both freedom and competitive markets. Try reading Adam Smith!  So why this effort to demonize every elite EXCEPT the lords?

* Only one generation of human beings did not know “class warfare” - the Post-World War II generation that lived in the miracle that FDR built - a vigorous capitalist-entrepreneurial market and booming middle class... amid the flattest non-pyramidal social order ever seen. The first time ever that self-made millionaires outnumbered the inheritance brats.

Sure, some FDR regulations were excessive. But just try to argue with those results.  The crux: as the anti-FDR cult grew ever-more vituperative and bitter toward America's most popular president ever, it tore down everything he built... all three of those vital metrics of US national health have diametrically reversed.  And this is good for America... how?

Why are people who make grand pronouncements so unwilling to let their opinions change, when shown the failure of their predictions?

* Ask your "ostrich" friends: "Tell us how to avoid “class war” now that 400 families own a greater share of our wealth than 50% of Americans. Is there some disparity that would finally make you worry? When they own more than 75%...Perhaps more than 90%? WHEN will you admit that we’ve returned to the normal condition that reigned in 99% of human cultures? Then will you admit that Franklin Delano Roosevelt wasn’t Satan, or that our parents in the "greatest generation" weren't complete idiots, after all?"

All right, some of that sounds “liberal.” I guess I’ll be accused of that leaning even more, after my next posting about Ayn Rand.  But I promise, I’ll skewer some on the other side, soon!

Also remember this. Libertarians - especially Ayn Rand followers - are not "right-wingers." They have their own perspective and I'll show that it is a very close cousin of ... Marxism.


== The Abortion fight ... and the Bible ==

Mississippi voters recently defeated a ballot initiative proclaiming that life begins at conception. Here's an eye-opening letter in the LA Times by Sandy Smith... and one wonders why this wasn't brought up till now!

"I don't know what Bible the folks in Mississippi are reading, but it's not one I'm familiar with. The New Testament has no references at all to a fetus, but the Old Testament is very specific. If a man kills another man, he must pay with his life; if he kills an animal, he must offer restitution. But, according to Exodus 21:22: "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows." A fetus was considered potential property."

I say again, the whole and entire purpose of the anti-abortion crusade was to give the right a "moral high ground" against foes who seem much more giving and Jesus-like. It lets them say "saving babies trumps all other things that would've made that hippie Jesus side with the left! That one issue makes Jesus side with us!"  An extremely effective polemical trick.

See more in my posting: Abortion and the "Jesus Effect."

== A Bit of History ==

An interesting word introduced to our comments section blogmunity by a new member: Seisachtheia was a set of laws instituted by the Athenian lawmaker Solon (c. 638 BC–558 BC) in order to rectify the widespread serfdom and slaves that had run rampant in Athens by the 6th century BC, by debit relief.

Under the pre-existing legal status, according to the account of the Constitution of the Athenians attributed to Aristotle, debtors unable to repay their creditors would surrender their land to them, then becoming hektemoroi, i.e. serfs who cultivated what used to be their own land and gave one sixth of produce to their creditors. Should the debt exceed the perceived value of debtor's total assets, then the debtor and his family would become the creditor's slaves as well. The same would result if a man defaulted on a debt whose collateral was the debtor's personal freedom.

Solon's law changed all that.  Forbidding slavery due to debt and freeing those who had been so enslaved.  Athenian slavery still existed, but under terms more gentle than Sparta, by far.

Re-Evaluating All We Know?

First an announcement: I’ll be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York City October 15-16, along with Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Stephen Wolfram, Michael Shermer, John Mauldin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jason Silva and many others. My topic: “So you want to make gods. Now why should that bother anybody?”  

Our can-do, problem-solving zeal may save humanity and light up the galaxy. Yet, talk of “tech-transcendence” inspires some – and worries others. What can we learn from the past about our future? This will be a stupendous conference. Sign up to attend!

== Can Science Re-Evaluate? ==

The physics world is buzzing over the recent faster than light particle result from CERN - one of those science stories that gets a lot of public press. Apparently, some neutrinos emitted by the great accelerator in the Alps are showing up in an Italian detector a nanosecond or so earlier than relativity ought to allow.

If the result is verified it will prove a major milestone. Among possible explanations might be that super-energetic neutrinos are bumped (very briefly) out of the four dimensional "brane" we call spacetime. (Envision separated membranes like soap bubbles; one film is our universe.) Hauled back in by gravity (the only force that carries between branes), they re-enter our world a bit farther along their old trajectory. Enough (some suggest) to explain the apparent cheating of ol' Einstein. No, I ain't pulling your leg. There are brainy guys who ponder such stuff. And if this, or some other exotic explanation, pans out then we're in for interesting times!

But dig it, please -- extraordinary claims call for extraordinary (and reproducible) evidence. One of the great things about our civilization is we get to see scientists constantly checking, re-checking and poking at whatever Standard Model reigns in their field.  In my life, nearly all of these re-checks have resulted in only minor re-adjustments -- with the exception of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy findings. (Even if they are disproved, it will only be by something else stunning.) Others, like Cold Fusion, caused yearlong investigations and Re-Evaluations of All We Know (REAWK!) but with negative results.

I find it all healthy and look forward to seeing this very competitive truth-finding process apply to the new CERN "FTL" results.  Still, it worries me that many in the press and public take a very unhealthy attitude - that re-appraisal in a branch of science somehow means it had been "all wrong" before.  Some take it as revelation that science is waffling or poorly based... instead of proof of the very opposite.  Others yearn for an upset apple-cart! They see any sign of a re-proved Standard Model as evidence of stodginess or oppression by Old Professors Incapable of Seeing the New (OPISN).

To be clear, I have known plenty of OPISNs! But the incredibly competitive nature of science (Adam Smith would be proud) generally makes them targets of the next wave of bright young guns.

Look, given our heritage as a superstitious species that danced to incantations by campfires, it should be no surprise that many of our neighbors are emotionally out of tune with science, or don't see how its competitive process results in ever-improving models of the world. Models that keep getting better, even when some part of them is shown to have been incomplete, or even wrong. That is how they improve. (Duh?) The ultimate market.

It is only human to perceive a process that you do not understand and judge it by the way your own mind thinks.  But racism was also deeply human. And feudalism. So come. Start by repeating this aloud: "It can be fun to re-evaluate all that I know! Heck, I might even learn something."

There. Don't you feel more scientific already?  Now to make that same spirit work in politics....

Oh... while I'm at it... here’s another paradigm-changing update: Could Dark Energy and even Guth’s “inflation” be overly contrived theories for something more easily explained? By the existence of hyper-long gravitational waves -- left over from the Big Bang?  These might elucidate the recently discovered preferential direction in the cosmos - the so-called “axis of evil.” Plus the revelation that distant-most galaxies seem to be accelerating their velocity of recession from us (thus requiring dark energy to explain the hyper expansion).  The gravitational wave concept makes such cludges unnecessary. Maybe. This paper is certainly worth a read.

== Space Updates ==

Does our solar system exist inside a bubble? Astronomers say we're in a “local bubble” in the interstellar medium – perhaps a result of stellar explosions millions of years ago. (See my cosmological short story about... "Bubbles"!)

Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, depicted in foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. (Nearly every article has compared it to Tatooine from Star Wars -- so I'll avoid that cliche! Oops too late.... dang Star Wars $%#$#$!)

Similarly cosmic! Anyone with a soul should find this breathtaking! Watch a Saturn fly-by video composed from high-resolution images from the Cassini Orbiter.

Scientists analyzing data from the Kepler spacecraft for exoplanets have encountered a problem: noisy stars! Before Kepler's launch, researchers had assumed that most Sun-like stars would be about as quiet as the Sun, with mild fluctuations in luminosity. Noise in the Kepler data is much larger - much of it variations in the stars themselves. Sunspots and magnetic activity are the most likely culprits – perhaps because about half of the sun-like stars in the Kepler field are younger than expected (Young stars spin faster, with more vigorous magnetic fields.) If this youthful bias is true of the entire Milky Way, it could alter our understanding of how stars are born and die.

Note also... if our sun is older than average, it might help explain the Fermi Paradox.

How would humans survive extended voyages in space? Five men cooped together over a year to simulate a Mars mission... apparently were going stir crazy! Yipe! (Well, look, several are Russian. Jeepers, did you ever read the book or watch the original film SOLARIS? All is explained.)

See the Solar System in action!  Stunning animation of planetary and satellite orbits – set to any date you choose.

== Life, the Universe and Everything ==


How Life arose on Earth, and How a Singularity might bring it down. This Scientific American article reporting about a recent biological conference is worth reading from top to bottom. Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll opened the meeting by commenting that “The purpose of life is ... to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” There  you go...

From another talk on the scaling of life: “An organism’s lifespan is proportional to the 1/4 power of its mass, its heart rate goes as the –1/4 power of its mass, so the total number of heart beats is independent of mass—a universal value of about a billion beats for all of us. Use them wisely.” (Except humans get three times that! We’re the Methuselahs of mammals. See my article "So You Want Immortality?")

An interesting and fair discussion of the possibility that dolphins have a sort of language and a sort of “intelligence.”  As a sort-of dolphinish guy, I actually have subtle and complex beliefs about this.  The folks I know who’ve worked with high cetaceans all tell me their impression: that the creatures seem to “wish they were smarter.” Subjective, but poignant and telling. (I’ll discuss dolphin “uplift” further in my next novel, EXISTENCE.)

== And a Few Updates ==

Being Human in the 21^st Century: Again I’ll be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York City October 15-16, along with Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Stephen Wolfram, Michael Shermer, John Mauldin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Jason Silva and many others. My topic: “So you want to make gods. Now why should that bother anybody?”  Come on, sign up!

Oh... I may announce an open fans-n-friends bar session in New York, stay tuned!

OTHER COMING EVENTS: 

I’ll be speaking at TEDx Brussells November 22: A Day in the Deep Future.

New Orleans! I'll be Author Guest of Honor at the Contraflow Science Fiction Convention the weekend of November 4-6.

Also attending the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego.

FANNISH ANNOUNCEMENTS:

One of my classic short stories “Bubbles” is in the latest issue of the fine online sci fi zine LIGHTSPEED!  And Harlan Ellison, my rambunctious pal, is doing an audio reading.  I’m honored.

A cool fan site showcasing my novels! Thanks to Susan O'Fearna.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous... or at least now for something completely different... David Brin playing the harmonica at the Reno World Science Fiction Convention (thanks to Lawrence Person.)