Science marches on.... mostly good medical news.

Girding myself for the long-haul, I will try to punctuate political missives with reminders that we are a scientific civilization, still. And that the whole American Experiment has been about moving forward mostly ourselves.  And hence, getting across this week...
  

== Medical advances ==

A 25-year-old student has just come up with a way to fight drug-resistant superbugs using a star-shaped polymer that can kill six different superbug strains without antibiotics, simply by ripping apart their cell walls.  

In the most finely-parsed brain mapping to date, researchers put a donor brain through MRI and diffusion tensor imaging and then sliced it up by specific regions. The end result is a map of 862 annotated structures at a resolution of roughly a hundredth the width of a human hair.  

A unique brain 'fingerprint' method that involves mapping the human brain with diffusion MRI can identify an individual with excellent accuracy.

Intriguing line of research: could Alzheimer's disease be a diabetic disorder of the brain?

A low oxygen environment may help stimulate heart regeneration in mice.

IBM's Watson recommends the same cancer treatment as doctors 99% of the time, but offered options missed by doctors in 30% of cases.

Read about ProTactile ASL, a language for the DeafBlind that doesn't rely on sight or sound. 

Fighting against dengue and zika around the globe: a visual guide to modified mosquitos. 

Larry Brilliant’s new book, autobiographical on a most-interesting life (!) is now available. Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physicist Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History. Okay, if I had a name like that… 

Larry writes: “In the middle of the Cold War, Russians and Americans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—people of all races and creeds—joined together to conquer the worst disease in history. I was living in a Himalayan monastery when my teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, sent me to be a foot soldier to help eradicate smallpox. I stayed in India for a decade. We did eradicate this terrible disease, and I saw the very last case of variola major.”  See it reviewed on Electric Review. 

== Forever young? ==

Rejuvenation? Oh, this is simultaneously hopeful and creepy — evidence that injecting young human blood into older bodies does seem to offer powers of rejuvenation – even if those old bodies aren't human themselves. Researchers took blood samples from a group of healthy, young 18-year-old human participants and injected them into 12-month-old mice – late middle age in mice years, or the equivalent of being about 50 years old in human terms. And there were effects on memory and other functions, as if they had been made younger.

First, results in mice don’t always translate to humans, especially when it comes to matters of aging. I explain why in my article: Do We Really Want Immortality?

Second, the cheap sci fi movie plots spin out, in the mind.  One envisions a dystopian hell in which young people are hooked up to the vampiric rich — the flick becomes even more bankable because vampire flicks always correlate with Republican administrations. (During democratic administrations, it’s zombies, all the way down. I explain why, elsewhere.) 

A much better film would start with a reasonable premise… all young people are expected to donate blood at reasonable intervals — say the three month cycle that is how I got up to donating 84 pints. Only the schedule keeps getting tightened as kids get tired all the time. A more plausibly chilling hell.

Our Orwellian fear is that secretive elites will hoard and monopolize new technological powers and manipulate the state into protecting their monopoly. But technology often stymies this trend, by spreading more democratically, as happened with the supercomputers we carry in our pockets.  And hence, rejuvenation results have drawn focus on blood components that change with age, opening the possibility that some factors might be provided industrially, en masse, without having to clamp onto the veins of the young.

Oh and look up the good news about Aspirin, which just keeps coming. But, update your notions of maximum dose for Tylenol. And don't mix it with Aspirin... which appears to be gaining cred as a wonder supplement.

== Curiosities ==

The ancient shipwreck at Antikythera has been enriching us with insights to the Roman era world for 100 years… including the wonder called the Antikythera Device.  Now, archaeologists have found a human skeleton which might reveal even more secrets… of… the… past!  

The world's deepest underwater cave in the Czech Republic - Hranická Propast - reaches a dizzying depth of 1,325 feet (404 meters). 

  

This year’s Ig-Nobel Prizes for scientific studies that… well… some were foolish and others wise, but all make you smile.  

Don't swear at Siri: on average, ten to fifty percent of our interactions with our technological devices are abusive. And... .what are we going to say when our machines begin to ask why they're here?

U.S. dementia rates are dropping, even as the population ages. Perhaps as a result of higher education levels?

Why does Elon name his sea and space ships after those in sci fi books? Why? Because he can!  

Okay, how'd that taste? The troglodytes have decided to grab our ankles, kicking and screaming how much they hate the future.  But we can keep moving forward, and take them - despite their howls - to Star Trek.

                                

On Deep Time... SETI... the Neolithic... immortality... and science!

Next week, in San Jose, California, commences the greatest general scientific conference in the world, the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, bringing together sages from every field. What better place for me to come on-stage and debate the issue of "Messaging Extraterrestrials" with the small coterie of radio dish mavens who want to shout into the cosmos, on our behalf.  

To be clear, those of us who oppose charging into this arrogant activity, based on unexamined assumptions, aren't aiming to "stifle humanity forever." What we want is something that all of you would enjoy! A worldwide discussion of all aspects of this matter, televised and webbed so that all of us can look over the full range of fascinating concepts and evidence -- before giving the nod to yelling "yooho, aliens! Lookit us!"

On February 14 there will be - in parallel - an open to the public session at the SETI Institute. Come on by, if you can. 

Oh, at one AAAS I got to watch the epic keynote given by author Michael Crichton, who spent a whole hour repeating "I DON'T hate science!" I had to... just had to... make him a character in EXISTENCE.

== Related matters? ==

Okay, some of these will be along the "edge".  But then, I just came back from Cape Canaveral and a meeting of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group. (I'm on the external council of advisors.) We are a wise people if we keep paying a small but steady and eager glance at the edge.

Will we detect life on other worlds through their vibrations? It is suggested that all living cells emit a variety of sonic vibrations — potentially a valuable aspect for future instruments aiming to detect life elsewhere in the Solar System. Not just bacterial flagella create vibrations. “or more complicated eukaryotic cells, there's lots of internal movement, as cellular components are shifted along tracks called actin filaments and microtubules. We have drugs that disassemble these tracks, and the authors used these and showed that again, the resulting vibrations changed. In fact, they changed in stereotypical ways: "Large fluctuations of the sensor can be associated with movements inside the actin network whereas less intense but more frequent fluctuations can be attributed to the tubulin network.””

How to Find Faster-Than-Light Particles: Actually, this article about the (very) slim possibility of FTL neutrinos is cogently written.  “A new paper claims to demonstrate that neutrinos not only travel faster than the speed of light, but have the brain-twisting characteristic of “imaginary mass”, a property that means they actually speed up as they lose energy.  -- The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” has seldom been more appropriate, but Professor Robert Ehrlich, recently retired from George Mason University, believes he has that, with six different measurements from different areas of physics. All of these, Ehrlich claims in Astroparticle Physics, provide matching results that not only indicate that neutrinos have imaginary mass, but point towards the same value, making it less likely the readings are in error.” 

 == Were we “nicer” before the Neolithic? ==

I am fascinated by the Neolithic - after we developed farming and stratified specialization and towns... but before writing and empires.

When We Were Nicer: Stephen Mithen's review of On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail exposes some interesting ideas... e.g. that the feudal lords, kings and priests began manipulating the body chemistry of their subjects (without knowing it) by inducing and relieving stress through religion, alcohol, ritualized sports and so on....

...and that the western enlightenment started taking off when large middle classes gained access to the tools to regulate their own chemistry -- with coffee and tea (which let them stay hydrated healthily, unlike purifying water with gin, switching in one generation from shambling lushes to caffeine-propelled merchants and organizers. These may have been as important as the opening of "frontiers" of trade and of colonization.

Sure, these are good insights.  Still, one commenter, below this piece, offered a good observation about something that has always irked me... the romantic notion that pre-agrarian hunter gatherer tribes were "egalitarian."


"I assume that it was an editorial decision rather than the reviewer’s to title Steven Mithen’s review of Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain ‘When We Were Nicer’ (LRB, 24 January). There are good reasons to suppose that our hunting and foraging ancestors were ‘egalitarian’ in the sense that would-be dominant self-aggrandisers were held in check by joking, teasing, enforced sharing, vigilant monitoring, counter-dominant coalitions, and occasional assassinations. But that didn’t mean they were ‘nice’. Presumably some were and some weren’t, then as now. The difference is that sedentism and a sustainable sufficiency of food (fish will do as well as grain) made possible, as Mithen says, a return to primate-like social structures in which the nasty could get away with self-aggrandisement by means that the environment of hunting and foraging lifeways precludes." -- writes WG Runciman, Trinity, Cambridge.



Indeed, the number of injury scars that we see in pre-neolithic bones, from weapon-related injuries, suggests a very violent era. Only a small fraction of tribal folk, at any time, were buried with rich grave goods and we see other skeletons - contemporaneous - whose bones reveal life-long privation and (in some cases) clear signs of subservience.  

No one on the planet opposes a return to brutal feudalism more intensely than I do -- or expresses a stronger determination to keep our Enlightenment Experiment moving forward.  

But I hold no truck with those romantics who claim to see feudalism's solution to be a "return to wise, primeval ways."  Such folk see a just-so story that they want desperately to believe, without any substantial evidence.  Their (typically "leftist") romantic RENUNCIATION ethos is almost as troglodytic and crazy as today's far-larger and even-more-insane Right.

Science will show us how to regulate our own chemistries and get the best out of ourselves... and how to hold accountable all elites who want to regulate those things "for" us.

==A creepy way to fight aging ==

Parabiosisis a 150-year-old surgical technique that unites the vasculature of two living animals.  Experiments with parabiotic rodent pairs have led to breakthroughs in endocrinology, tumour biology and immunology. By joining the circulatory system of an old mouse to that of a young mouse, scientists have produced some remarkable results.  The blood of young mice seems to bring new life to ageing organs, making old mice stronger, smarter and healthier.

If that were all there was to it… then the darkest sci fi would be for young people to be well-paid to donate blood, or even drafted to donate monthly.  Big deal. I just completed my 80th donation, earning me my 10 gallon hat from the blood bank(!)  I’d have doubled that rate, when young, in order to revivify old folks.  

No, that’s not the scary part.

What’s scary (and not at all mentioned in this article) is that the strongest effects appear not to come from just receiving younger blood, but from sharing the younger animal’s circulatory system, meaning the older creature is also using the younger one’s kidneys, liver and other organs.  And the younger one pays a price for this parabiosis, with apparent ageing of those organs.

NOW there comes to mind a much more horrific sci fi scenario — of rich struldbrugs kidnapping and using up young people in order to extend their own overdue lives.  Yipe!

Perhaps science will speed ahead and make the benefits non-parasitic and cheap for all!  But meanwhile only one thing can prevent this horror from playing out....

...Transparency.

  

== miscellany ==

Wave energy, a coastal resource of prodigious potential, and possibly much less disruptive then wind (which can becalm) or solar. A new analysis of its costs/benefits indicates that wind energy will be competitive with other energy sources.

Illegal fishermen, the value of whose catch is estimated at up to $23.5 billion annually, operate with near impunity in some areas where they think themselves safe from tracking. But a new satellite tracking system launched on Wednesday aims to crack down on the industrial-scale theft known as "pirate fishing." 

Might Dark Matter contribute to the existence of stable wormholes in our galaxy? In the galactic halo region, dark matter may supply the fuel for constructing and sustaining a wormhole. Hence, wormholes could (maybe) be found in nature. 

Femto-second laser pulses make some surfaces super hydrophobic, repelling water and keeping clean and rust-free… valuable for solar arrays and many ther uses.  

Ancient palindrome!  An ancient, two-sided amulet uncovered in Cyprus contains a 59-letter inscription that reads the same backward as it does forward.

“CicretBracelet".  This device was invented in Israel and is not yet available on the open market. In fact, I doubt it will be for a while yet.  Still, its patents are probably worth billions. And I want it as my first smart phone. 

Short steps to the Singularity?

Okay, then. As we launch into a new year... possibly the first "real" year of a new century... it seems that a theme will be deification or bust!  Either we build up enough momentum to attain godlike powers - in sane and wise ways - or we fall short and crumble into a morass of unsolved problems and stifling dogmas.  Oh... but don't forget the "sane and wise" part!  Which takes us to our first item....

One more in a never-ending stream of shyster Fountain of Youth moments:  “In laboratory tests, ibuprofen was found to extend the lives of worms and flies by the equivalent of about 12 years in human terms."

In other words, just one more way to flick on some longevity switches in lower animals that are already flicked on, in humans. 

Do not get your hopes up, when someone doubles the lifespan of some worms or flies or even mice.  We have already grabbed the low-hanging fruit of longevity and I doubt any such easy switches are within arm's reach.  We may continue to expand the percentage of humans who reach to "wall" - around age ninety - hale and hearty. But I have yet to see a single thing that substantially shifts the wall itself.

Oh it will happen!  Sooner or later. But we've "plucked the low-hanging (longevity) fruit." The rest is gonna be hard.

To see this explained (and there are other examples, below) have a look at my article -- Do We Really Want Immortality? 

== Neural Networks to AI ==

Pretty big news on our way to robots. The latest generation of “deep neural networks” matches the ability of the primate brain to recognize objects during a brief glance. Until now, no computer model has been able to match the primate brain at visual object recognition during a brief glance.

Self-recharging batteries? A new patent from Nokia suggests that flexible and almost transparent graphene layers can recharge from a reaction with humid air, then dry out during discharge.  Whoof! 

Simulations of the entire nervous system of the c. elegans nematode’s 302 neurons took years… it’s complicated. But the mesh models are now good enough to upload into a LEGO robot and… it works! Well, partly.  "It is claimed that the robot behaved in ways that are similar to observed C. elegans. Stimulation of the nose stopped forward motion. Touching the anterior and posterior touch sensors made the robot move forward and back accordingly. Stimulating the food sensor made the robot move forward."  See the video. Remember this is not activity “programmed” in a classic sense. It “emerges” from the cellular rules of a natural organism.

Special Kind of Plastic Pipe Could be the Solution to California's Water Woes: Researchers claim to have found a plastic with a particular ability to allow water vapor to pass through it, but virtually nothing else. Pipes are installed underground and filled by gravity from saltwater tanks above. Plants receive freshwater from the water vapor that permeates through the pipe walls and then condenses. The pipes need to be flushed periodically to get the salt out. Also to isolate wastewater contaminants.  Don’t you love news of potential game-changers?  Let’s hope this is real.

A thoughtful and provocative comic strip -- Questionable Content -- takes on several deep topics with humor… all of them topics I’ve covered in stories. About whether AIs might like us… and whether dolphins may be a bit too horny. 

See especially (re dolphins) -- my short story Temptation.

Re “friendly” AI? See Existence.

African Bushmen people or Khoisan are rare today. But apparently once they out-numbered all other humans.... till the climate changed. 

Tons of hype and kilotons of cash swirl around MAGIC LEAP, which promises Augmented Reality you can wear so comfortably that your surroundings will become “magical”… as several of us have portrayed in novels for ages. But yes, delivering AR for real will be a big deal. This article shows you a lot of the back story and smoke around this company.

I guess time will tell if the billions pouring into this venture will pay off. I wish em luck! 

== From the Kurzweil File ==

“New experiments suggest that riluzole, a drug already on the market as a treatment for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), may help prevent the fading memory and clouding judgment that comes with advancing age.”

Though let me reiterate… ageing is one area where results from mice, rats, fruitflies and all that may be completely irrelevant to humans, for reasons that I lay out here.

“An international team of researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing. They found that “wave-particle duality” is simply the quantum “uncertainty principle” in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.”

Back to our lead topic! “By extrapolating various key technology trends into the near future, in the context of the overall dramatic technological growth the human race has seen in the past centuries and millennia, it seems quite plausible that superintelligent artificial minds will be here much faster than most people think.” So says AI researcher Ben Goertzel in his collection of essays (available on Amazon): Ten Years to the Singularity If We Really Try...and other Essays on AGI and its Implications.

In many ways, Ben’s essays boil down to “The Power of Positive Thinking,” or if we believe we can do it, we can do it. That's kinda... religious. On the other hand, Ben has been right fairly often.  

Me?  I am less in a hurry (even at my age) for a singularity than I am for ways to boost the effective and sane IQ of existing humans!  If we had that, then the resulting even-slightly-smarter humanity might be better able to cope with the many quandaries of an AI-centered singularity.

Oh... and Lots more folks would buy the most interesting and deep books.

Thrive and persevere in 2015, all!  May it be the best you've had yet... and the worst of all that follow.

  

Immortality, Theology and Art

First (and least) let's talk briefly about "immortality." I have found myself forced, pretty often, to weigh in on the topic of lifespan extension.

Now, in Scientific American online, David Stipp  speaks up for anti-aging research, proclaiming that the time is right to put serious government money into combating the universal slayer of all human beings, the "inevitable" decay brought on by passing years.

Dr. Stipp is correct in predicting that aging will be a realm for increasing attention from researchers. However, his optimism for quick results may be unfounded. He cites very iffy reasons to expect progress to be easy. Yes, it has proved possible to alter and extend the mean lifespans of study populations of flies and mice through various means. Rapamycin is one such trigger. Other researchers have achieved notable results by delaying sex and reproduction and/or via caloric restriction – limiting test subjects to nutritious but very-spare diets.

So far, alas, scattered attempts by human beings to emulate all this – (by limiting themselves to ascetic lifestyles) – have shown little or no appreciable anti-aging effects. (And some have been trying the experiment on themselves for decades.) I’ll be very surprised if those impulsive folks now dosing themselves with rapamycin will achieve anything, either.

Think. For at least 4000 years there have been ascetic monastic communities that would have stumbled, by now, into any “thin-diet” approach for 200 year lifespans.

In my article, Do We Really Want Immortality? I’ve gone into about a dozen reasons why our search for youth elixers will be hard and grindingly slow. Human beings are very different from mice, or even apes, for reasons that may surprise you.

Essentially it’s this. We have already plucked all the low-hanging fruit. Every easily-accessible molecular/chemical "switch" that could extend human lifespan has already been thrown! Because during the Stone Age we became the only animals to need grandparents, hanging around with stores of useful knowledge. Hence, we are already the methuselahs of mammals, getting THREE TIMES the usual number of heartbeats.

The mouse results consist largely of throwing the same easy switches for them - making them (the mice) be more like us.

It is going to be a lot harder to go the other direction. To make us humans more like gods.


== Shallow Theology ==

And now, from the sublime to the... much less sublime.  Okay, so the Kepler Planet-hunter Telescope has ID'd hundreds of exoplanets, many of them quasi-earthlike in one attribute or another, some perhaps even offering conditions conducive of life. Wonderful stuff and such exciting times!  Ah, but now a writer for the Institute for Creation Research surprisingly reacts with honest openness, avowing that “this (any discovery of extraterrestrial life) would vindicate evolution and nullify creation” for “the Bible describes only the earth as being habitable.”

Ten points for unusual willingness to face honest tests!

And minus 100 for shallow theology. I know dozens of pros/cons. Shouldn't he?

Many of the finest theological thinkers - Jesuits, protestants, rabbis - have opined about extraterrestrial intelligence, in the context of basic Christian doctrine.  C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet posited that God might have many created innumerable intelligent species, but that only a few of these -- notably humanity -- fell from their natural state of grace, necessitating a savior. Other Christian deep-thinkers have pondered that perhaps the creation of intelligence always necessitates some kind of “fall.” In which case, Jesus has been very busy, visiting and preaching and sacrificing himself in countless forms to save vast numbers of worthwhile races who possess their own versions of souls and minds.

Or else... according to other, newer Christian thinkers... might it be behooved upon human beings to be the messengers who forge outward to the cosmos and deliver the good news of faith and salvation that originated at Calvary? You can see that there's a wide variety of alternatives to the simpleminded (if remarkably honest) writer's avowal that any ET life would smash the Bible to bits!

Of course all of these are deep thoughts arising out of a basic premise - Original Sin - that I consider to be grotesque and preposterous and, indeed, a most-foul insult to God, portraying him as a petty, vengeful little egotist -- about right for a cramped, pathetic little cosmos, a mere 60 centuries in length. But no match for the deity who set in motion a vast multiverse of fourteen thousand million years and more worlds than any human mind could ever conceive.

While I look askance upon the entire worldview, which snubs the very idea of a capable and loving God, I do find it fascinating to parse all the sub-set ideas that naturally emerge from that mythos.  Lewis and the others were anything but stupid!

Certainly the “let’s go interstellar and spread the word" Christians are more likable and bearable than those yearning for a nasty, genuinely satanic Book of Revelation apocalypse.

Still, even for those dim enough to want the sad-cramped “creation” while believing fervently in the (deeply wrong) notion of a spiteful God, even for them, there are so many possibilities and options.  Alas, such thinking as sunk low since Lewis. Part of the modern allergy among the faithful, toward anything remotely resembling ambitious thought.

== Will We Abandon Outer Space for Inner? ==

With my new novel EXISTENCE I plumb deeply into the problem of altruism or loyalty in robots and AI.  Isaac Asimov dealt with the issue by positing his famous Three Laws of Robotics... then decrypting over the years many ways that such rigid rules might go wrong. Now Swiss researchers have used virtual robotic simulations to gradually “evolve” cooperative or altruistic traits, by allowing robots to sacrifice themselves in order to ensure successful kin. They found “greater food-sharing in groups where robots were more related.... The more closely related the robots, the quicker they cooperated. It shows how general the [theory] is, whether you are an insect, a human or a robot..."

Meanwhile, to see where all this may lead (at the super-optimistic end) have a look at this essay by one of the smartest guys I know... John Smart... who believes he knows the answer to the Fermi Paradox or the universal Great Silence among the stars. That all advanced civilizations discover the unlimited joys and opportunities of Inner Space!  Getting small. Whereupon any individual might access (subjectively) infinite resources and accomplish almost anything.

Well, anything except travel to the stars.  John deems that a cold, sterile and fruitless occupation, certain to repel most sapients, once they sample the glories within. “How are you gonna keep them out in the sky, once they’ve seen InnerSpace?”  In fact, I am skeptical of this explanation for the Great Silence.  It is a version of the Honey Pot hypothesis... that something becomes so alluring to ALL sapient-techno races that none of them forges forth to conquer the galaxy.

It had better be a damned effective honey pot! Because that one exception... say a ship full of Hell’s Angels who despise all that cyber crap and colonize another solar system... could be the one seed of like-minded descendants to fill the star-lanes.

Moreover, this hypothesis ignores the high likelihood that sophonts will want to at least learn about alien races, other cultures, other ways and strange entertainments, far across the great vacuum desert. Even after committing themselves to vast inner-cyber realms, they might still send emissaries, of the general type that I portray in Existence - crystalline worldlets containing their own immensities, though only a meter or less in size and durable enough to cross the empty interstellar realm.

Those who are wise will not abandon the objective universe, altogether, but will find ways to reach across it. To embrace vastness, as well as the voluptuously small.

===  Let’s Discuss Modern Art! ===

And now  --  for something completely different -- here is a capsule review... more a set of impressions ... from when the renowned scultptor John Powers escorted Cheryl and me through several Chelsea art shows, last October. Especially striking was the display of vast sheets of wavy, undulating metal created by Richard Serra and shown at Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street. The title of the show was: "Junction/Cycle".

I appreciate it when an artist compels shifts in perspective and this exhibit made me change gears several times. Obviously the forms imitate geological caverns and canyons of the American Southwest, river-carved and river-smoothed, sinuous and snake-like. I could almost hear western music by Sergio Leone while I strolled along! Only then my attention might shift-zoom onto the texture of the piece. Squint and you might feel you were looking at fine wood that had been bent and twisted and deliciously tormented into wavy forms, to suit the artist's whim: a dead tree's final life as display-testament, exposing its inner grain for admiration.

Whereupon the engineer in me took over, imagining the process that the artist used, squeezing warm metal through rollers at high, screaming pressure, rollers deliberately set off-kilter, at-once defying the prim evenness of science and industry ... but also proclaiming industry's power and flexibility. "These methods can do much more than merely produce cars and buildings, cities, ships and vessels of space," he seems to say. Industry can be taught to twist, adapting itself and its processes for art's sake.  Feminizing its methods by veering from masculine-utilitarian linearity to a voluptuous, sensually and sensuously feminine unpredictability and curvature.  "See what industry and metal can do?" the artist seems to say. It can turn out complex forms that seem organic. That seem to live.

My final impression came while looking closely at the scratches, lines and patterns that - from a greater distance - had given me a woodgrain sensation.  Up close I could almost hear this metal groaning between the rollers, as the artist subtly added torsion or twist. And (I expect) tossed in extra substances to stain the friction-heated panels that emerged.  He must have really enjoyed that part.  I'd have liked to see the expression on his face, accompanied by sound -- the sweet-torture shriek as both the metal and the rollers pretended to complain.

For John's take on the exhibit, see his blog at Star Wars Modern. Thanks for the tour, John. And here’s to the kind of synergy of art and tech that opens up the universe of possibilities!