Hypocrisies from the past and future

Oh the two-faced silliness.  The new "election fraud commission" has demanded information - including social security numbers - of every voter in America, without even setting up a secure and vetted site and infrastructure to receive and secure the information. And that sets aside the Orwellian aspects of the plan.

To be clear, my resistance is not purist or reflexive. I would happily support a major beefing up in voter ID if it were part of a negotiated deal that included:

(1) massive compliance assistance to help poor people, divorced women, the elderly etc to actually get proper ID. (Without this, every single person shouting about Voter ID is a pure hypocrite.)

(2) a national agency to vet and inspect every voting machine and ensure that it is both secure and paper-trail hand-auditable

(3) weekend voting, and finally

(4) an end to gerrymandering.

Dems should say: “Fine. You give in on those four honorable and reasonable things and we’ll consent to a massive, five year program to ensure all votes and voters have proper ID.  

Refuse those reasonable things and all you prove yourselves to be is hypocrites.  Well... that and outright cheaters.

== Repeal, Don't Replace? ==

Don't think that "Repeal, don't Replace" is a bug -- it is a feature.  To be clear, even the draconian-stupid-cruel House and Senate bills on the table do not actually rescind Obamacare rules. They merely tweak factors and conditions and amounts and thresholds within Obamacare! Which would be fine, but for the outcomes, which are universally bad for everyone. Oh, and the hypocrisy of raging against a program that had been the GOP's original plan, all along! Including the Individual Mandate... all part of the Republican Platforms - and RomneyCare - for a decade. That is, till Obama touched it and gave it cooties.

Oh, but now Trump is saying: "Just repeal! We'll replace it later!"

The principal effect that folks and press foresee will be tossing 24 million off health insurance and sending us back to double digit health cost increases.  

But that masks the main GOP priority, and top effect, which will be to give the top 0.1% a huge tax cut. They know that supply side voodoo cuts for the aristocracy have never delivered predicted benefits. Not once. Ever in any place, at any time, in any context. But they figure they can eke through one more in this way.

== The opposite to philanthropy... ... or sanity... or Jesus ==

See a superficial but informative - if a bit biased - overview of the darker side of transhumanism: "The Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia." Every paragraph of this essay contains insights and truths, especially about the clade of unsavory ingrates who were given everything they have by enlightenment civilization, and who respond by gleefully pissing in its patient and ever-generous face.

Beyond failing to note this ungrateful hypocrisy, the writer - Mark O'Connell - alas falls short in dozens of other ways. For example, he fails to note that human improvability or augmentation or even transcendence do not have to lead straight back to feudal-style hierarchies - though, yes, that is the aim of raving neo-feudalist Holnist wannabes -- dreamy putzes who hilariously assume they'd land on top, in a dog-eat-dog world; when they would be bitches or kibble. 

In fact, going back to Wells and Asimov and Heinlein, there have been thinkers who pondered how equality of opportunity -- at least in generous spirit -- could continue in a future that offers countless options to all. The very same enlightened attitude that brought us here, out of feudalism's festering 6000 years of delusional stupidity.

O'Connell quotes libertarian maven Peter Thiel: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And I throw up my hands over the insipidity of alpha-minuses who cling desperately to the delusion that they are alpha-plusses.

Really? Dig this, neither freedom nor democracy are the deep fundamentals at issue here!  

We treat them as sacred things, because only by sacralizing them can we give them the devoted protection that they need, in the face of other, older and nastier axioms. But in fact, Democracy and Freedom are fundamentally justified by their undeniably spectacular effects.

They are both pragmatic tools that empowered the Enlightenment to achieve the one, central invention that created our renaissance of science, productivity and low error rates.  The one thing that enabled us to create positive sum arenas which ended vast wastage of human talent (typical in other societies) and whose outputs have been staggeringly and exponentially greater than all other human cultures. All others, combined.

== Let me explain, one more time ==

It should please my libertarian friends - those not steeped in randian masturbatory fantasies - that I deem the core desideratum to be competition. Or more exactly: reciprocal accountability, the essence I described in The Transparent Society. Adam Smith, the American founders and the great transformative scientists all know that human beings are delusional... indeed, so will be AI!  

The paramount fact about Homo sapiens is that we cannot pierce our own delusions. But others, outside our own echoing skulls can point them out for us, a service provided by our competitive arenas: markets, democracy, science, courts and sports. (But not yet provided by the Internet!)

Freedom and democracy are good things. But their primary justification and utility arise when they serve as ways to open up reciprocal accountability, criticism and error-correcting competition. To be clear, you cannot get actual, flat-open-fair and transparent competitive arenas without freedom or without democracy.  

Without the miracle invention of reciprocal accountability, we would soon be locked back into some feudal or quasi-feudal hierarchy, drenched in delusion and error and voluptuous incantations that self-serve a circle-jerking elite... 

...exactly the format that crushed the hopes of 99% of our ancestors, leaving us mired for 60 unnecessary centuries in crushing filth and ignorance. And that is exactly what these deeply deficient mental onanists yearn for.

== Darkness from the past ==

Late last year, next to the ruins of ancient Niniveh, the Tomb of Jonah was liberated from ISIS. 

I deem Jonah to be among the most important books in the Bible and one that you (yes, you) should read carefully. It is important for the book's lesson that fate is not 'written" or locked-in. No doom is sealed in advance! God can change his mind. 

And the implication is both philosophically consistent with all we know about the objective universe, from quantum mechanics to complexity and the Butterfly Effect, and it offers a clear-eyed refutation to some of the worst fanaticisms spewed by some of our neighbors.

Even if you believe the noxiously sadistic Book of Revelation (whose character is the opposite of Jesus, in every conceivable way) to have been a sincere prophecy, at the time that John of Patmos dreamed it -- all that means is that... God... changed...His ... mind. 

Think about it. Jonah makes clear that He can and does change his mind. And hence, we have a perfect answer to those Revelation-zealots who rub their hands in gleeful anticipation of nearly all their neighbors - fellow citizens - suffering the fates meted in that loathsome book. Sadistically eager for us to suffer eternal damnation, they relish a looming end to all the things that make us human -- ambition, uncertainty, courage, striving, improvement, art, argument, endeavor... yes, and democracy. And oh, yes. They pray for an imminent end to the United States of America. 

Now think about it. The Biblical God made threats and then relented, lots of times. And yes, he carried through on some threats! Only dig this: it never took Him more than a year or so, to decide. Not once, not ever, did it take 2000 years.

Hence, even if the wrathful ravings of Patmos really were God's intention, around 70 CE, we can pretty much assume - with confidence - that a loving God not only changed His mind about the awful BoR (even assuming He/She/ ever even made that awful threat). 

Moreover, given the spectacular successes of science and our recent enlightenment civilization - outperforming all predecessors, combined, by orders of magnitude, in every human desideratum, from freedom and knowledge to fun - we can hope this means that He will safeguard us from such people getting their ignoramus hands on the tools that science gave us. (Just look at the fantastic images that our loyal space probes are returning to Earth, and tell me what's magnificently sacred action.)

This is more than enough reason not to race to impeach Donald Trump!  His leaky, ill-disciplined and silly administration would be replaced by Mike Pence and a sweeping takeover by utterly disciplined Dominionists, bent on one thing -- apocalypse. A Pence White House would not leak. It would be hell-bent, literally, on ending the world.

To sample the BoR and up your education about what those people actually believe and want, see Patrick Farley's fantastic depiction, as a Pokemon Manga. 

== Oddities ==

Ever think the English language is strange? This article shows you some aspects you never knew, that are fascinating ...  indeed!  Take this example: 

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”  

I agree though there is a way-out, by using a hyphen to turn any pair of adjectives compound. ‘French-green’ or ‘old-French’ or ‘green-lovely’ can sound a bit odd, but suggesting you know something the reader doesn’t know, and inviting them to suspend the rules. We do it all the time in ferric-ironic interstellar-cubical California-new science fiction.

Gmail lets you store “canned responses” so you don’t have to retype the same stuff dozens of times.  You can then fill in whatever is unique, each occasion. Though… I’ve done this using Quickeys for 25 years.

davidbrin.blogspot.ca – the Canadian repeater for this site - has been tagged with a "sites whose addresses have been found in spam messages" rating and as a result is being blocked by some content management software, e.g. Trend Micro and Bluecoat . There are no issues with the site. (Thanks Glen Mackey.)

For your health... pay attention to what you eat: Foods to decrease your chance of heart disease.

Outlive the fools,

More Than Human? And science roundup!

First an announcement: Wednesday, May 10th I'll speak at the “Digital Revolution,” a free public forum that the Union-Tribune will hold at the University of San Diego’s Kroc Theater. It starts at 6:30 p.m. All you have to do is register online at uniontribune.com/future."

== More than we are? ==

Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture that was founded to allow humans to keep up with the advancements made in machines. The interface is intended to work by augmenting that which makes us human: our brains.  I've written extensively, in both science and fiction, about the quandaries of human consciousness and the murky, non-linear paths that might have brought us here. For example.

A panel has recommended the development of an A.I. index, analogous to the Consumer Price Index, to track the pace and spread of artificial intelligence technology. That technical assessment, they said, could then be combined with detailed data on skills and tasks involved in various occupations to guide education and job-training programs.

The Next Human: taking evolution into our own hands. National Geographic offers Beyond Human: how humans are shaping our own evolution. Read this excellent  article, which reviews human genetic change… how many ways we have changed - at the level of genes - since technologies began altering our way if life, letting us occupy Tibetan and Andean highlands or drink the milk of animals, or consume alcohol. The authors go on to examine how techniques like In Vitro Fertilization and CRISPR are opening the science fictional worlds of deliberate gene slicing.  

When asked whether this is ethical, Linda MacDonald Glenn, a bioethicist at California State University, Monterey Bay, comments; “For this sort of technology to be banned or not used is to suggest that evolution has been benign. That it somehow has been a positive. Oh Lord, it has not been! When you think of the pain and suffering that has come from so many mistakes, it boggles the mind.”

And it goes farther: “Hundreds of people have radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices embedded in their bodies that allow them to unlock their doors or log on to their computers without touching anything. One company, Dangerous Things, claims to have sold 10,500 RFID chips, as well as do-it-yourself kits to install them under the skin. The people who buy them call themselves body hackers or grinders.” 

How soon to Molly, from Neuromancer?  Or even my dittoes from Kiln People? But oops, some things are predictable: “Another grinder …wants to implant a vibrator beneath his pubic bone and connect it via the web to others with similar implants."

Yeow. Very interesting article. Though alas, things are much more complicated. Take the implication that we can increase human lifespan and human intelligence by simply finding the right genetic (or nutrition) switches to flick. In both cases, indicators suggest the the smartest or longest lived humans are crowding against glass ceilings that will be very hard to shatter. 

Yes, certainly we have crashed through other limitations before!  But in the case of IQ, it seems that when smart people breed together, their odds of brainy offspring rise in company with their chances of having kids with problems like autism spectrum. (In Existence I portray how tech might overcome this by empowering autistic folks and freeing them.)

== Can we delay aging? ==

This could be among the scariest bits of science, especially in an era of rising aristocracy and wealth disparity. “Researchers at Stanford University led by neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray showed in a 2014 study that infusions of blood from young mice reversed cognitive and neurological impairments seen in old ones.” 

If this brings to mind some of the 1950s science fiction tales about rich old coots having young men and women squeezed for their life essence (in some cases it was prescient about blood transfusions) then how about “parabiosis,” a bizarre technique in which two mice were sutured together in such as way that they shared a circulatory system - which found old mice joined to their youthful counterparts showed changes in gene activity making them more youthful. And the younger mice aged.

The article is more optimistic, showing preliminary evidence that the juvenizing factors may be in blood plasma, which millions of teens could easily donate to millions of elderly without it becoming a matter of being preyed upon.  Indeed, science might decipher the elixir components and synthesize them and that will be that… 

And now credible news that billionaire Peter Thiel may be trying it.

Only not so fast.  Results in mice almost never apply to humans, when it comes to lifespan extension - and there are reasons. Sorry.

A chemical switch to slow the aging of cells? Again and again I point out that human are probably slready using all these ‘low-hanging fruit” for lengthening lifespan. anti-senescence treatments that work in mice almost never do a thing in already methuselah humans. Now, to be fair, these results do seem to apply to human cells. Still, see my story "Chrysalis' in my collection, Insistence of Vision to see how this might not go as expected!

== Next Steps in Tech ==

Speaking of our generation's irreplaceable man... Elon Musk has revealed his new tunnel boring machine -- an ambitious plan aimed at reducing traffic congestion. I've thought a lot about tunneling over the years and we spoke about it recently. Though dinner was mostly about Mars.

Oh, and see the next transportation revolution… electric planes!

A game changer? Announced: a water harvester that uses only ambient sunlight to pull liters of water out of the air each day in conditions as low as 20 percent humidity.  

A team has invented a revolutionary way to remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from air by triggering artificial photosynthesis in a synthetic material — breaking down carbon dioxide while also producing fuel.  Well, tentatively. 

Wish you had this in school? A tiny module you could put on a professor’s lectern and it not only records but transcribes the lecture as text.  Now to have an AI explain it all…

Remember this breakthrough. “Graphene oxide can be produced by simple oxidation in the lab. Then, as an ink or solution, it can be spread on a substrate or porous material. Use it as a membrane, and apparently it can separate salty from seawater. The sought-after development could aid the millions of people without ready access to clean drinking water.”

Have a look at the Deep Space Gateway, the habitat Boeing wants to send to cislunar space. It could house critical research for human exploration and could dock other vehicles using a system similar to the International Space Station’s, though more modern and compact and possibly apropos for  use as an interplanetary spacecraft.

American farmers are using Ukrainian hacker firmware to free their tractors from lock-in to John Deere for all repairs. Seven states are considering laws to allow people to hack or repair their own private property, an issue that has been riling libertarian spirits all over, and where I find my libertarian roots aroused.  Only note, the villains are not exactly "big bad government."

Are we wired for numbers? Human understanding of counting is central to our understanding of the world around us.  Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting the Course of Human History, by anthropologist Caleb Everett examines the evolution of our perception of numbers -- and how it has influenced human behavior in societies across the globe.

An accidental discovery of real potential importance. Wax worms can apparently eat and break down polyethylene plastic bags.

Deriving traces of human DNA(Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc) from ancient caves… but not from bones? Rather from dirt?  

Heroes of Science(!) action figures! Unfortunately, not yet available.

There. Down with the war on science and all of its practitioners.  They want all this to stop.

"Consensus" science? And more science...

First, before getting down to science, congratulations to my bro Kim Stanley Robinson, for winning this year's Nebula Award for best novel. 2312 is an epic that spans the solar system and a myriad fascinating ideas. And felicitations also to the other Nebulists - the delightful/brilliant Nancy Kress and the talented Andy Duncan and Aliette de Bodard. Learn more at the SFWA site.

Oh, one more announcement. See today's  San Diego Union Tribune article/interview about me and the Clarke Center Starship Conference (with a familiar face smiling on page one of the paper on our doorstep). 

Mostly, I was asked about SETI... the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. By coincidence, at the Starship Century Symposium at UCSD, we had the honor of hosting Dr. Freeman Dyson and Dr, Jill Tarter (head of the SETI Institute) at our home, along with luminaries Geoffrey Landis, Allen Steele, Kevin Grazier and many others.

== Do scientists "vote" on what is true? ==

Is it true that "97 percent" of scientists working in the fields of climate, meteorology and planetary atmospheres stand by the current consensus that human generated, carbon-rich gases produced by human industry are responsible for substantial, rapid climate change?

That claimed figure -- long denied by one major wing of Culture War -- now appears to have been verified systematically.  Almost all of the extremely smart folks who study climate on eight planets and who were responsible for transforming the Weather Report's range from two pathetic hours to ten miraculous days agree that something reckless and perilous is going on, and therefore some new technologies and some carefully discussed and economically bearable alteration of habits may be in order.

Does 97% expert agreement mean that something is necessarily true?  My late colleague, author Michael Crichton, led the charge among those on the right whose catechism now declares that "science cannot vote on what is true: there is no such thing as scientific consensus."  Indeed, like many polemical lies, that line has a basic level where it is true. Nature, indeed, cannot be coerced by mass opinion, even among brilliant scientists. There have been times when 97% of savants were dead wrong!

Take these examples from a well-written little piece  on the Fox News site that relates "five blunders in science." Indeed, at the surface, these interesting anecdotes -- (e.g. Lord Kelvin's calculation of the age of the Earth and Einstein's cosmological constant) -- simply go to show that science is not a realm of all-knowing priests, but of brilliant and not-so brilliant workers whose interplay of argument, experiment and reciprocal criticism is just as important as coming up with terrific models. When you and I read this article, we'll say, here's evidence that science works well.  Ah, but then note where this piece was published. (And imagine the  very different sub-text lesson that is drawn by the average Fox customer; these guys know their propaganda.)

In fact, those occasions when 97% of scientists get  it wrong are exceedingly rare. And science has been much better at discovering and correcting systematically wrong models than any other walk of life has been. Moreover, those rare cases are irrelevant to the matter at hand…

...which is whether to let public policy be affected by -- and prudently attend to -- important failure mode warnings by the vast majority of those who actually understand an important field of human knowledge.  And to give them some benefit of the doubt, rather than reflexively obeying the same advertising firms that claimed cars don't cause smog and tobacco is good for you.

When 97% of those who know a lot more than you do about something warn you that there may be danger ahead, only idiots blithely ignore such expert diagnoses and go charging ahead with business as usual.  You criticize and question while heeding the advice of folks who are much, much, much smarter than you are.

See also: Distinguishing Climate Deniers vs. Skeptics and Arguing with your Crazy Uncle About Climate Change.

== Science Potpourri! ==

A team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Canada have discovered pockets of water that they say have been isolated for at least up to two billion years. What makes the find especially intriguing is that the ancient water carries all the essential ingredients for life.

Reversing heart disease in older mice?  Sure. Claiming this portends a reversal of aging in humans? Malarkey.  Mice are not analogues for human aging. Period. For reasons I go into elsewhere.  Good news for mice though!

NASA's Lunar Monitoring Program uses a special 14 inch telescope to stare at the moon whenever it is in view from Marshall Space Flight Center.  This is the sort of thing we need to do more of -- and it bore result startling results when a boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon in March, igniting an explosion so bright that anyone looking up at the right moment might have spotted it.  Only now we have a device looking for us.

Read a fascinating and cogent explanation of why NASA and Google are investing in D-Wave's quantum annealing approach to quantum computing, which appears to work better for optimization problems than any of the gate based quantum computer experiments. This is a frontier with many puzzles and many potentials. (A few of them illustrated in Existence.)

Amateur beekeepers are taking up controlled breeding to seek hardier varieties that can withstand New England winters, resist mites, overcome parasites and pesticides and help stave off the honeybee collapse that threatens agriculture across North America.  Augmenting work done at universities, these clubs are terrific exemplars of useful avocation science and the Age of Amateurs.  Heck, I just rescued a hive on my hill, moving it from a lethal place to safety.  Third time I've done it. I think I'll buy some bee boxes next.

Would you gardeners use human poop that's been treated and transformed into organic fertilizer? About 50 percent of the bio-solids produced in the U.S. are returned to farmland through a process that is heavily regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency… To sell Class A biosolids to farmers and gardeners, facilities have to ensure that there are no dangerous heavy metals or bacteria in the end product. Still…

Researchers have used transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS) which mildly "shocks" the brain with high frequency electrical noise. Supplied to an area known to be important for math ability, this can apparently improve a person's ability to perform calculations. No one exactly knows how this relatively new method works, but it does seem to allow the brain to work more efficiently by making neurons fire more synchronously.  Augmentation, here we come. Expect huge use in China.

Alien? Subhuman primate? Deformed child? Mummified fetus? The Internet is buzzing over the nature of "Ata," a bizarre 6-inch-long skeleton featured in a new documentary on UFOs. A Stanford scientist now asserts the DNA is purely human and not "alien." Uh huh. Right.  Okay, look, I deal in the strange professionally.  And the lack of  any external and separate-referenced studies of this thing screams alarm bells.  Despite sober-sounding rhetoric in the articles, I give it 90% to be a hoax. But I never let 90% -- or even 97% -- prevent me from keeping a corner of my mind... well... ready for more questions.

== And still more science! ==

According to preliminary orbital prediction models, comet C/2013 A1 will buzz Mars on Oct. 19, 2014. JPL calculations suggest the comet is most likely to make a close pass of 0.0007 AU of Mars  (that’s approximately 63,000 miles from the Martian surface). But uncertainties are still high and the comet might either strike the planet or break up. (If it struck... what a show! And maybe water reservoirs might awaken?)

But that's unlikely and not what concerns me most.  What I fret about is the storm of pebbles, dust and gas  accompanying the dirty iceball (according to my doctoral dissertation). There is real danger that a near passage might sand-blast our Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissaance Orbiter spacecraft, now delivering valuable science from above the Martian surface and providing services to the Curiosity and Opportunity landers. I find this prospect both exciting and worrisome.

But stay tuned… 2014 will be significant in other ways.

A disappointingly superficial article about geo-engineering by Clive Hamilton appeared in the New York Times, glossing over many aspects and issues, and leaving out any mention of the one geo-engineering remedy to climate change that would actually replicate what the Earth is already doing -- ocean fertilization to remove CO2 from the atmosphere while stimulating new fisheries. By far the most promising (despite very badly-done initial "experiments"), this remedy almost certainly will be used by our children, in one form or another, yet it is almost never discussed. Alas for journalism.

Where is it all leading?  Max More and Natasha Vita-More are the editors of The Transhumanist Reader: Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future, the first book to present a comprehensive survey of the origins and current state of transhumanist thinking about the future of humanity. The volume offers of core writings by seminal thinkers, exploring the scope of the effects of human innovation of science and technology and how, in turn, science and technology often changes human nature.  It goes into arguments for and against human enhancement and life prolongation along with issues of social concern and biopolitics.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the world's most famous astrophysicist, and he is a Trekkie.  "I never got into Star Wars," Tyson tells us. "Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all."  Despite his getting way too inflated lately I always liked the guy a lot.  Here's one more reason. I guess.

== Science I'll preen about ==

San Diego-based Torrey Pines Logic is developing the Beam 100 Optical Detection System for the military; it sends out pulses of low power lasers that can detect various lenses out to roughly one kilometer. Returning pulses are analyzed for signatures indicative of optical glass, discarding noise from other glass, like bottles, windows. (Note one for the predictions registry?)

Meat from tissue culture could be a powerful game changer, one that has appeared in science fiction since the 1940s and certainly in many of my own past novels. Now researchers hope to make one hamburger from calf muscle cells grown in dishes… a small and expensive beginning, but so was the first micro-processor.

Reminiscent of my "privacy moths" on Planet Jijo, in my novel BRIGHTNESS REEF:  "Croatian Bees Are Being Trained to Hunt Down Deadly Land Mines."

A 3D printer is slated to arrive at the International Space Station next year, where it will crank out the first parts ever manufactured off planet Earth.  More than 30 percent of the spare parts currently aboard the International Space Station can be manufactured by Made in Space's machine. I presented a paper to NASA in 1982 predicting this exact event, someday.  It was dismissed as sci fi, alas.

And now I'm rather tired after three tech and space conferences in a week, discussing starships, asteroid mining, transhumanism, national and international tech policy, SETI, destiny, Dyson Spheres, and fine wines... I almost certainly have the best job on the planet.

Now... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Technologies that might change everything

Straight from the pages of Existence… though sooner than I expected… researchers now claim to have the entire Neanderthal genome in published form, as clear as that of "any person on the street." Okay, start your countdown till someone announces she is pregnant with… That will be a real boat-rocker…

...but there are other events on the near horizon that may be more important to saving our world.

Cynics love to extrapolate while optimists look for game-changers. In my latest novel, I portray both spectra of personalities, each with some strong points to make… though only optimists get to see the most important waves of change coming. Take this year's arrival of reasonably priced and stunningly efficient LED light bulbs, for example. Businesses are already doing whole-building replacements and you should start now in your heavily-lit areas.  They pay for themselves so quickly that fluorescents are hogs, by comparison. Within two years, incandescents and pigtails will be considered bizarre or quaint.

That’s one game-changer.  Another is the rapid fall in prices for solar energy.  Photovoltaics can't yet compete with the plummeting (in the US) price of natural gas, but their economics are surprising cynics and could accelerate soon.

Now comes a bit of news that could matter a lot. And it has to do with the latest wonder material that's getting huge attention in Europe and across the industrialized world.  Graphene… a sheet-like molecular form of carbon, related to graphite, though in the way that a pile of organic sludge is similar to an Opera diva who can pitch a perfect game. I'll leave for another time a listing of the uses being explored, from electronics to biochemistry. But one recent announcement stands out as particularly hopeful.  Using graphene to create ultra-thin membranes, engineers at Lockheed Martin have just announced a newly-developed saltwater filter that could reduce desalinization energy costs by 99 percent.

Desalinization typically involves a sheet of composite (TFC) membrane manufactured from a thin-film layer of polyimide stacked on a porous layer of polysulfone. The problem? The thickness of these membranes requires high pressure to push water through. Lockheed Martin's Perforene filter is made from single atom-thick sheets of graphene. Because the sheets are so thin, water flows through far more easily.

Now if they can solve many problems (like tearing) and bring this on the market soon… our future will look brighter.

== Calling Algernon! Increasing intelligence? Or lobotomizing? ==

Toddlers with iPads... teenagers on FaceBook and iPods... do new electronic media help them learn to think? Or hinder? Studies show that "digital  natives" of the new generation are less agile at divided attention than they think.  Now, in the Atlantic Monthly, comes a fascinating article, The Touchscreen Generation, showing that the landscape is not simple. Electronic media do hold out promise... but it may be a while before we know what works, and what lobotomizes.

Meanwhile, George Dvorsky reports on io9 that by grafting human glial cells into the brains of mice, neuroscientists were able to "sharply enhance" the rodents’ cognitive capacities. These improvements included augmentations to memory, learning, and adaptive conditioning.  Yay Algernon. But the implications go much farther.

Long dismissed as mere support structures for the nourishing and maintenance of all-important neurons, glia have lately been shown to have important direct effects upon information processing and may have played a vital role in the breakout of human intelligence. Human glia are larger and have more fibers than those of lower species.  As to the mouse experiments: human glial progenitor cells were transplanted into each hemisphere of the developing forebrains of newborn mice -- who later acquired new conditional associations and learned tasks significantly more rapidly than did their unengrafted controls. (Glial cells extracted from other rodents had no such effects.)

It gets weirder. "Gap junctions" are connections of astrocytes (a type of glial cell)  to other astrocytes, and even to neurons. Gap junctions in neurons bypass the usual synaptic connection, providing a "short circuit" between cells and function to create high speed networks of signal propagation within some areas of the brain, eyes, heart, and other parts of the body. Gap junctions are sometimes referred to as "electrical synapses."

Wow.  Amazing stuff.  Yet not quite surprising. For you see I expected something like this. Indeed, the news will excite those who are interested in some science-fictional ideas, for example uplifting animals,  plus enhancing our own intelligence and curing brain disorders. But it will dismay others, e.g. those who hope soon to download their minds into immortal robots.

Ray Kurzweil  and others in the transhumanist community talk about the "connectome"... the number and placement of the synapses that spark and flash with ion transport between the axons and dendrites of a hundred billion neurons.  There may be close to a trillion synapses.  Still, that is a tractable number and if they can be modeled by digital computer cells, then Moore's Law will cross a trillion fast connections easily by 2025, allowing us to create a brain-in-a-box theoretically as capable as a human one.

That leaves software as the tougher nut to crack!  But lets put that aside for now. Kurzweil and others pin their hopes on that grail – the date when Moore’s Law lets a box emulate a trillion synapse connectome.  Supposedly in time to download the true minds of aging Baby Boomers. That is… if synapses are the only important thing going on in a brain.

== Is that all we are? A trillion synapses? ==

At a Singularity Conference I once pointed out to Ray  and some of the other transhumanists that their fervent calculations might be way off regarding how many Moore's Law cycles it will take to have computers capable of emulating a human brain.

There is preliminary evidence that some degree of murky, non-linear (and hence difficult to model) "computation" may take place within neurons, and even surrounding astrocyte, glial or other support cells in a brain. Perhaps hundreds or thousands of bias computations for every synapse flash! Add to this the "gap junction" effects we saw above, offering a myriad paths for info to flow around synapses, and the math changes dramatically. It may take many, many more Moore's Law doublings before we can emulate in silicon the marvel that is a cogent human brain.

That’s bad news for the connectome transcendentalists!  Even if you successfully freeze or plasticize a brain to preserve every synapse for later analysis, you may still lose all the other delicate states within and between cells.

Ah but switch gears now.  Might this news help us enhance the intelligence of animals? Or even enhance our own?  Poul Anderson started the conversation in his epochal novel, Brain Wave. We had better start preparing now.

Oh, then there's this:  mouse neurons, or brain cells, implanted into rats can survive with the rats into old age, twice as long as the life span of the original mice. "The findings are good news for life extension enthusiasts."  Um…. maybe not.

(BTW: Those of you who have read Existence know about "Porfirio" the super enhanced rat.  Can I call 'em?  Or what?)

== Science & Tech Miscellany ==

The new Samsung Galaxy S IV, will reportedly include an eye-tracking feature to make it easier to scroll pages without physically touching the screen. Some people will view this as an added convenience.  But gaze tracking may have a dark side.  In any event, you can glimpse where this all may lead in Existence, in Rainbows End and other near future SF.

We aren't in immersive Augmented Reality yet (AR), but the world I've portrayed in science fiction is fast approaching.  See what a difference eight years makes, in scenes outside the Vatican in 2005 and 2013. Prediction... this business of holding your phone over your head, in order to see over a crowd, is cool.  But our Google Glasses will project simple stalks upward to leave our hands free.  We'll have antennae like My Favorite Martian.  And you can see it portrayed vividly by renowned web artist Patrick Farley.

Japan became the first country ever to successfully extract natural gas from underwater deposits of methane hydrate, a frozen gas sometimes referred to as "flammable ice." The breakthrough could be a boon to the energy-poor nation, which imports almost all of its energy. And if the technology proves commercially viable, it could benefit other countries — including Canada, the U.S., Norway, and China — that are also seeking to exploit methane hydrate deposits. Better they should be used this way, than for climate change to simply release them into the atmosphere.  THAT is my nightmare scenario.  And the denialist cult is making the danger more acute, every day.

$30 million in Google Lunar X-Prizes. That's the initial lure drawing companies and consortia to develop private moon landers/rovers that some hope to launch in 2015, in search of riches like platinum group elements, or Helium 3, or (only in a few polar craters) even water.

"We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find about four potentially habitable planets, give or take," said Ravi Kopparapu, a post-doctoral researcher in geosciences. "That is a conservative estimate," he added. "There could be more." According to his findings, "The average distance to the nearest potentially habitable planet is about seven light years. That is about half the distance of previous estimates," Kopparapu said. "There are about eight cool stars within 10 light-years, so conservatively, we should expect to find about three Earth-size planets in the habitable zones."

More claims of "meteoritic life"? A team claims to see tiny, electron-microscopic trace fossils of living organisms in a meteorite that fell onto Sri-Lanka.  The group happens to involve core figures in the "panspermia movement," making the "discovery" suspicious… if interesting.

== And even MORE science Miscellany! ==

I first saw glimmers of this some years ago. What if every light bulb in the world could also transmit data? At TED Global, Harald Haas demonstrates a device that  flickering the light from a single LED too quick for the human eye to detect can transmit far more data than a cellular tower -- and do it in a way that's more efficient, secure and widespread.

I'm not certain how accurate this report is. But it claims that Chinese scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence. 

Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.  It is essentially a variant on the eugenics approach described in Robert Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon in which couples would fertilize a hundred zygotes (embryos) then analyze them and choose one to bring to fruition and birth, a wholly natural child that they might have had anyway, but still with both good and worrisome implications.

A fascinating article, We Aren't the World,  goes into why, after decades of emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism, the sciences of anthropology and psychology still tend to assume uniformity and that people around the world think largely like Americans… who may (according to some metrics) be the weirdest people of all.

President Obama has proposed a bill to allow anyone to unlock a cell phone that they already own.  This should be just the beginning of a trend toward freeing patents and copyrights and other Intellectual Property from the hellish trap they have fallen into.  Instead of serving their original purpose, to end millennia of secrecy and lure creative people into sharing their innovations, they have become tools for constraining and limiting use, even of things that you rightfully own. I do not oppose IP or patents or copyrights!  We do need to remember what they were for. Here's an essay going into some detail.  For even more of the basic concept, see: The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? 

For decades, "phage therapy" was  a realm of medicine that always seemed to glimmer on the tantalyzing horizon. Pursued mostly by Soviet scientists, the notion was to find viruses that would preferentially infect and kill the kinds of microbes that are parasites on humans. There is even a variety that attacks human cancer cells preferentially. An oncolytic virus is a virus that infects and kills cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue.  In science fiction, the concept of an oncolytic virus was first introduced to the public in Jack Williamson's 1951 novel Dragon's Island. Alas, this field hovered at the edge of proved practicality… until (apparently) right now. In response to encouraging clinical trials. For example, Amgen purchased the oncolytic virus company BioVex for $1 billion in January 2011. And more recent news suggests a phage will soon be attacking melanomas in people.  Hopefully without the results seen in the Hollywood film I Am Legend.

Wow. New York City at night, photographed from the International Space Station.

== And finally … ==

V. H. P. Louzada and colleagues appear to be endorsing my kind of human. "Here we propose the use of contrarians to suppress undesired synchronization."  Yes, they are talking about damping wild swings in neuronal networks, but the same wisdom can apply in societies.

See?  I told you folks it was wise to put up with ornery bastards!  Dogmas and polarized “sides” are a sure sign of diminished brain capacity.  Criticize everything. Even your allies. Especially yourself.