Tech Advances and really interesting angles on science

Every advanced nation on Earth – and many developing ones – have rapid, convenient, economical high speed rail systems linking major cities, allowing millions to bypass congested airports… except the U.S. Now some rays of light. California is plunging ahead with an HSR line – though funding from Bakersfield to Los Angeles will have to wait.  And the Obama Administration has found a way to bypass the laziest Congress in American history by lending Amtrak 2.2 billion dollars to upgrade some eastern corridors to 186 mph with comfortable, modern WiFi rich trains. 

California’s battle to get high speed rail is like LA’s desperate fight in the 1990s to get metro subways and trains. Right wingers fought it hard... and now we know life would be impossible there without the efficient and economical mass transit system.  Seriously, look 50 years from now. The very notion that there would NOT be high speed rail or tube transit up between SoCal and the Bay area is simply absurd. 

The question for sane folks is how? I am willing to listen to arguments that normal, world class high speed rail is obsolete! Maybe we should leapfrog the rest of the world! As Africa is leapfrogging copper wires. In which case, the most valuable part of the California project is clearing the rights of way.

Troglodytes, this will happen. We are a modern, technologically advanced, scientific nation. Get used to it.

== Tech miscellany! ==

UCLA neurosurgeons used ultrasound to “jump-start” the brain of a 25-year-old man from a coma, and he has made remarkable progress following the treatment. The technique, called “low-intensity focused ultrasound pulsation” (LIFUP), works non-invasively and without affecting intervening tissues.  

What is a "Weapon of Math Destruction”? It must be opaque to its subjects, harmful to their interests, and grow exponentially to run at huge scale. This is a clever re-phrasing of the intelligencia’s fad concept of 2016 — otherwise referred to as the Tyranny of the Algorithm. Take a look at Kathy O'Neil's new book: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increased Inequality and Threatens Democracy, reviewed on Boing Boing.

Are there still folks who watch fox-rants that "humans can't affect the Earth"?  A record-tying earthquake in the edge of Oklahoma’s key energy-producing areas rattled the Midwest from Nebraska to North Texas on Saturday, and likely will bring fresh attention to the practice of disposing oil and gas field wastewater deep underground. 

== Evolution in action ==

An almost sci-fi level of weirdness in this ant colony that’s been discovered inside an ancient, Soviet era bunker, in Poland. Atop the bunker, a normal colony of wood ants does their thing, but occasionally, workers accidentally fall through a pipe into the bunker and must make do in (to them) an apocalyptic, hopeless wasteland.  They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft. The sheer numbers of dead bodies they’ve carried to the periphery suggest that this orphaned wood ant nest has been active for many years.  Shivering, I can imagine so many stories…

In this stunning research video you witness - decisively -  evolution in action. You’re watching living things facing down new challenges, dying, competing, thriving, invading, and adapting—all in a two-minute movie that makes vividly clear how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. But especially that evolution is very real, going on around us, in real time. 

A teensy silver lining to catastrophic climate change.  “Scientists probing a newly exposed, formerly snow-covered outcropping in Greenland claim they have discovered the oldest fossils ever seen, the remnants of microbial mats that lived 3.7 billion years ago.”  (I have a scene reminiscent of this in EARTH.)  If confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the past, with many implications. 

A triplet fossil: A well-preserved fossil of a snake that swallowed a small lizard that had eaten an insect, some 48 million years ago. I don't know why she swallowed that fly...

== The nature of reality ==

Is there an objective reality? Plato and so many others have posited that our subjective worlds are unreliable – iffy senses delivering warped impressions to a brain that’s a muddle of murky memories and chaotic or compulsive emotions. Paul Simon summed it up – A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. Knowing this, sages have tried various ameliorations, some (like fiercely accountable experimental science) more successful than others (priestly declarations or Randian ‘objectivism.’)

Of course, science fiction has always danced along the margins between the subjectivity of art and human experience vs. the objective reality that Science keeps saying lies beyond Maya's veil, beyond Plato's Cave.  

We have to believe science because the results of experiment and of math are both so consistent!  And yet, the veil is always there and art - especially speculative literature - lets us poke at it in ways that science cannot.

Now cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, suggests that our problems perceiving the objective universe may be rooted in evolutionary biology. "Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness."

For many of you in this brainy community, that sentence already makes surprising sense.  For the rest, there’s the linked article or else Dr. Hoffman’s famous TED talk.  But it gets more interesting. “Hoffman then builds something even more radical out of his broken link between objective reality and evolution. He calls it conscious realism and it's based on the premise that "circuits of conscious agents" are what end up defining experienced reality. While there clearly is a world separate from us, Hoffman says, evolution does not give us access to that. Instead, he claims, it's our interactions as conscious agents that give shape to the reality we experience.” 

== Tech Advances ==

Innovation: Stanford researchers have invented a version of polyethylene — kitchen wrap—  that can beincorporated in clothing that allows infrared energy to pass straight through, while being opaque to visible light. (For clothing, duh?) A second issue: polyethylene does not permit water to pass through, was also fixed. The new material allowed a surface to cool more than a cotton garment by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, suggesting such coatings might save up to 45 percent of the energy required for cooling inside a building.  

One of two dozen tech zones where, if early promise comes true, we may change the whole game.  How about a long-lasting, safe, zinc-ion battery -- water-based, using cheap but safe, non-flammable, non-toxic materials, compared to expensive, flammable, organic electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries that cost twice the price. It could help communities shift from traditional power plants to renewable solar and wind energy production, where electricity storage overnight is needed.  

Google is developing a quantum computer in a 48-qubit grid that it believes will outperform the world’s top supercomputers.  

Fujistu Semiconductor Ltd. has become the first manufacturer to announce it is mass producing a new RAM that boasts 1,000 times the performance of DRAM but stores data like NAND flash memory.  The new non-volatile memory known as Nano-RAM (NRAM) was first announced last year and is based on carbon nanotube technology.  Because it uses power in femtojoules and requires no data clean-up operations in the background, as NAND flash does, NRAM could extend the battery life of a mobile device in standby mode for months. 

Episode two of Popular Science’s new sci- featurette show Future First is titled "Artificial Intelligence: Your Tutor and Nurse," features Ben Goertzel, and takes a look at artificial intelligence and its potential applications for education, health, and more.  A topic I’ve been talking about a lot lately. (It feels like a sudden wave.)  Oh, Episode number four will feature me as a head talking about SETI and METI and the Fermi Paradox.  You know. All that.

This fellah took the original schematics for the legendary CURTA hand-cranked calculator (1940s) and refined tolerances to produce a 3D printed version.  And now that he’s done it, that means YOU will be able to do stuff like this, within the decade. And as I have been saying for 30 years… we are entering the Age of Amateurs, when no truly good thing will ever again be lost.  We’ll, if you don’t count Nature….

A kewl and fun video about the Commodore 64! Which my son and I bought later in original packaging for 75$ (you can’t do that anymore) in order to solve a real problem which I describe here: Why Johnny Can't Code.  And this followup.

And finally... 

Here's an appeal to the group mind.  Someone have a look at this series and report back to us? This series from Terrafiniti addresses important topics… but also may be a be New Agey: “Towards 9 Billion addresses the critical issues that face our planet in the 21st century, from business and economics to sustainable energy and technology. I love its wide-ranging intelligence, lucid prose and interdisciplinary approach to scoping a new economics for our age.”  Topics include: What’s the Point of Capitalism? And 21st Century Natural Philosophy.  Yet, these are important topics. The books are free to download and – according to Joss Tantram: “consist of analysis and big ideas for how we might evolve our systems of value and production for a sustainable, equitable future. They also include discussion on the challenges of communicating unpalatable truths and the rise of truthiness rather than scientific method.” Okay. So let’s see which endeavors actually uplift the conversation.

Huh! New research suggests that most teens aren't vaping nicotine at all, but using "sweet and fruity flavors" like strawberry, chocolate cake and bubble gum. 

Wow. So you're going for all of the "cool" of smoking with (little? none?) of the suicidal-addictive parts? I keep telling folks - the next generation is smarter than us! (Though empowered by technology.) 

Mind you, it's still irritating to be near one of these rude "vaping" twits.  But teens have a right to be rude twits - a bit, some - I guess I was! Meanwhile though, this is much smarter and less noxious.