Can we “fix” social media without ruining them? One (of many) Practical Suggestions.

Twitter’s decision to slap warning labels on some Trumpian tweets – those seeming to incite violence - “was the culmination of months of debate inside the company over developing protocols to limit the impact of objectionable messages from world leaders — and what to do when Mr. Trump inevitably broke it.”

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday told employees he was standing firm in the company’s decision not to moderate a post in which President Trump said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” And with less than half a year to the U.S. election, that means the trolls - especially in those Kremlin basements - are looking at a welcome mat.

I am about to offer one small proposal - a potential partial solution - from among many that have never been tried. But first... perspective time.

The problem of toxicity in media is not a new one. Every new medium of communication was applied to nefarious ends, before it eventually lived up to its elevating promise. The printing press was first used to spread horrible hate tracts exacerbating Europe’s religious wars. Only across subsequent centuries did the spread of books truly uplift an increasingly literate population. 

Similar bad-beginnings were seen with the arrival of newspapers and newsreels. In the 1930s, loudspeakers and radio amplified gifted orators with godlike voices, sparking humanity’s worst era. It always starts by empowering predators. But over time, citizens became better at culling wheat from chaff from poison in each technology, and we all grew better for it.

Today (as some of us predicted in the 1980s) a similar transition is happening in digital media at 100x the speed and 10,000x the sheer volume of crap and lying misuse, leaving us with very little time to make the same transition. Meanwhile, evil or fanatical or insane manipulators twist the very concept of “fact” or “truth” out of all recognition. 

We need tools of maturity and we need them fast.

There are two general ways to achieve this. The first -- used in almost every society before ours -- was to set up a caste of censors, gatekeepers, priests or regulators of what the masses may see or know. Our entire Enlightenment Experiment has been a rejection of that approach, which stifled and brought nothing but calamitous error across history. All our values rail against it – e.g. in every Hollywood film. Indeed, so strong is this Suspicion of Authority (SoA) reflex -- especially in Americans -- that our enemies are using it against us, by attacking even the very idea of professional expertise.

The other approach is lateral criticism. Argument (ideally based at least somewhat on facts) can apply reciprocal accountability via markets, democracy and now the innovation of the web. It can work! We and all our vast array of modern miracles are proof. But the whole thing breaks down when we huddle in separated ghettoes of ignorance, reciting incantations and nostrums that are fed to us by evil men.

== Can we innovate ways to save innovative media? ==

In early 2017, I was invited to Facebook HQ, where executives and designers were wringing their hands. They fretted over how thoroughly their platform had been hijacked and abused -- much of it by hostile foreign powers – with clear intent to warp American democracy. And yes, for a brief time, folks at Facebook seemed serious about trying to find solutions, hoping to achieve a three-way win-win, starting (of course) with their top priority:

1 - Protect user growth and profitability.

But ideally these solutions would also...

2 - Maximize user freedom of self-expression.

3 - Reduce the amount and impact of deliberate or inadvertent campaigns of falsehood or incitement.

During my hour-long meeting with executives, I offered possible ways to achieve this trifecta. But I might as well have saved my breath. As the Trump Era became a new (if bizarre) normal, goal number three simply floated away.

So we now approach another U.S. Election. And seeing all their efforts to wreck the Western Enlightenment teetering in the balance, our enemies will redouble efforts to spread tsunamis of lies via social media. Moreover, while Facebook will remain obdurate until the end, Twitter and other platforms are beginning to take this seriously.

So, it is for them that I’ll trot out one – just one – of the proposals I offered Facebook on that futile day.

== The simplest method ==

Envision a pair of small symbols added next to the Thumbs-Up indicator, as in the example below.  Say an exclamation point and a question mark. Generally innocuous, these clickables allow the user to seek more information… or alternative points of view. Note in figure 1 below how they have minimal footprint on the user’s precious screen space.  

============

In Figure #1 (above) we see the two symbols are empty and easily ignored.  

Only now I lean on insights from Edward Tufte’s classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Because there are many dimensions of useful information that can be conveyed via a mere exclamation point!

In Figure 2 (below) we see how the exclamation point can convey several spectra of information, perhaps throbbing when the host company has detected a suspicious source or bad actors at work. Fullness – as in a thermometer – can show the host’s level of certainty that there’s a problem, while color or texture can bear upon the type of problem.

============

============

Users do not have to memorize any of the meanings! But they’ll learn, over time, that a tiny, flashing red exclamation point means there’s another side to whatever meme they are relishing. Moreover it’s hard to accuse the host company of partisan bias when the same thing happens to every side.

Is an offer of rebuttal enough to cancel toxic memes? Well, it can’t hurt to lure a few of the curious to sample refutations. And that tiny nonpartisan nag could be enough to crack the wall of a Nuremberg rally.

The second kind of clickable Alert-o-meter – a Question Mark - links to sites that are less adversarial and more informative than linked by the exclamation point. Here user preferences play a role. The follow-up path may be encyclopedic or lighter or even entertaining. The aim is to encourage curiosity and depth to the topic.  

============

============

Again, the User is free to ignore the small alert-o-meter symbol. (An hence the host site doesn't drive away angry customers.) Still, it lurks there, serving as a reminder that there’s more to this!

Not only does this help at least a little to re-establish the notion of argument and verifiability … that some sources are more verified and trustworthy than others… but we are entering an era when society may decide to modify the blanket protections enjoyed by social media companies, from all responsibility for malicious content. Ohnly a fool would ignore that possibility. An approach like this one might be just enough to protect the site host from liability for helping to spread lies with dire consequences.

============

And there you have it. Just one of a dozen ideas I offered mavens at Facebook in their panic after the 2016 elections … before they realized that the winners of that stolen contest actually wanted no meaningful changes at all, and their best (commercial) interest lay in leaving things alone.

Think about that. And realize -- nothing is likely to happen via self-regulation, or reform, or tweaks like mine, no matter how logical and helpful. Of course they have all sold-out and I am wasting my time.

We all know this dire moment will be resolved massively, in one direction or another. And when it is, a mere couple of innocuously flashing symbols just won’t do. 

Things can get worse...

==  It can get lots worse than Trump ==

God's Plan for Mike Pence: This Atlantic article reminds us who and what is waiting on the wings, if Donald Trump leaves the scene - voluntarily or not. 

“Because God works in mysterious ways (or, at the very least, has a postmodern sense of humor), it was Donald J. Trump—gracer of Playboy covers, delighter of shock jocks, collector of mistresses—who descended from the mountaintop in the summer of 2016, GOP presidential nomination in hand, offering salvation to both Pence and the religious right. The question of whether they should wed themselves to such a man was not without its theological considerations. But after eight years of Barack Obama and a string of disorienting political defeats, conservative Christians were in retreat and out of options. So they placed their faith in Trump—and then, incredibly, he won.”

“Pence has so far showed absolute deference to the president—and as a result he has become one of the most influential figures in the White House, with a broad portfolio of responsibilities and an unprecedented level of autonomy. But for all his aw-shucks modesty, Pence is a man who believes heaven and Earth have conspired to place him a heartbeat—or an impeachment vote—away from the presidency.”

I have elsewhere explained why all this talk of Impeach Trump is positively loony. Trump is a known quantity who shoots himself in the foot, daily. Almost every grownup in the civil service, courts, military and intelligence services are alerted to the madness, if not horrified and ready to heroically throw themselves under a bus in order to cancel anything too crazy.

But read here what’s waiting in the wings. Picture the conservative-by-personality officers in the Army and FBI etc, overcome with relief when the soft-spoken Pence moves in, a relief he would exploit with pre-planned care. Replacing the Trump White House, which leaks like a sieve, would be an utterly disciplined and tight ship of Dominionists eager to end the world and bring on every horror described in the Book of Revelation. 

(They are quite open about wanting this... an end to all democracy, diversity, tolerance, ambition, competition, cooperation, endeavor... an end to all children... and an end to the United States of America, amid fire and hell for most of its citizens. This is what they openly avow that they seek. Ponder that. And ponder The Button.)

I go through a dozen reasons why this man would be ten times as dangerous as Trump. You Americans have fallen for so many confederate traps, already. When will you start being canny, assessing the situation calmly, and acting for the long term. Like a Grant. Like a Lincoln? 

== Can it get any more blatant? ==

Trump’s nominee to run the Census  is the author of a 2008 book titled “Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.” The pick would break with the long-standing precedent of choosing a nonpolitical government official as deputy director of the U.S. Census Bureau. The job has typically been held by a career civil servant with a background in statistics. It does not require Senate confirmation, so Congress would have no power to block the hire.

Monsters and traitors.  Worse than that. Blatant confederates.

Your answer to mad uncles who cite the recent stock market rise as “the Trump Effect”: People who bought in at the inauguration of Obama in 2009 made a 300%+ killing. Maybe then this is just the historical trend that the economy of the first year of an administration is credited to the predecessor.

How long has he been an agent of – or at least a target for recruitment by – the Kremlin? Have a look how far back. Now combine that with the reasoning I lay forth here: that by far the favorite recruitment tactic of intelligence agencies is not bribery or ideology… but blackmail.

Values? Shall we try values? If we subtract outliers like Utah and Detroit & Chicago, name a metric of moral and healthy living that is not worse in Red America, from teen sex, STD and pregnancy rates to obesity, dropouts, divorce and domestic violence, gambling and so on. Name... one... exception.  Other than abortion which is a disagreement over fundamentals. 

Let’s dive in, according to this article:

“Last year, Bible-believing Louisiana had the highest murder rate in the country. Moore’s Alabama came in third. Prayer-drenched Mississippi had the sixth-worst. You’re much safer when surrounded by skeptics. 

"The irreligious state of Massachusetts had the fifth-lowest murder rate, with only 17 percent as many homicides per capita as Louisiana. Godless New Hampshire and Maine had the nation’s lowest murder rates.

“Of the 10 least religious states, none is among the 10 most dangerous. Of the 10 most religious states, only Utah is among the 10 that are least hospitable to homicide.

“God-fearing places also don’t have a stellar record of upholding the family. The divorce rate is 50 percent higher in Alabama than in Massachusetts — which, by the way, was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. New Hampshire and Mississippi, at opposite ends of the religiosity spectrum, are virtually identical in the propensity for marital dissolution.”

Then this: President Trump retweeted, quoted and highly touted a right wing site called “Britain First”… that relished the attention. Then the group tried frantically to scrub tons of pro-Putin propaganda on their board lest anyone get the right idea about the links between "conservatives" and Kremlin.

== Are you SURE Halloween is over? ==

Here are scary items:

* Johns Hopkins psychologist John Gartner suggests an “80 percent chance” that Trump will push the nuclear button.

*Are you reassured, then, that the top U.S. nuclear commander told a security conference Saturday that he would not execute a nuclear launch ordered by President Trump if he considered the order to be “illegal?”

* Well, I have repeatedly said we depend utterly upon the sanity and maturity of the U.S. military Officer Corps… and the dems should be recruiting thousands of retired officers to run for every red-district office.

* Still, there is a way to safety that’s short of impeachment and more reliable than officers hinting they would disobey “illegal orders,” and it might even get passed by a Republican Congress. It is veto-proof and calming and entirely plausible. See it here.

* Conservative intellectuals have led the way in denouncing Donald Trump as not a "true conservative." And yes, a conclave of residually-same conservatives might yet gather to salvage something decent and American from the ashes of their movement. But this article - and the book The Reactionary Mind - attacks the very idea that Trump is anything but what he seems. A factotum of aristocracy and the far-right.

* And this article by a Christian minister asks: “Christians have traditionally rejected the worship of money, sex and power. Do we still?” A year into Trump's presidency, Christians are facing a spiritual quandary.

“Meanwhile, in the absence of a clearly-articulated foreign policy vision from the administration, The Economist—hardly a bastion of left-wing politics—has taken a stab at trying to characterize the Trump Doctrine. Their take: "America's foreign policy: embrace thugs, dictators and strongmen." They note the President's friendly relationship with Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, and others, not to mention his disdain for refugees, immigrants, and the like. While the magazine is no fan of Barack Obama's foreign policy, he seems like Nixon or Talleyrand or Metternich next to Trump.”  www.electoral-vote.com

And yet, I have repeatedly told you that there is much hope to be found in the members of the United States Military Officer Corps. Now there’s this: “Sixteen of the nation’s top retired military commanders are urging Congress to pass gun control legislation, arguing that there are many steps that can be taken to curb gun deaths that do not violate the Second Amendment.”

 == Wikileaks and accountability ==

There are times when I’d rather not be right. Going back to the beginning, I have always had mixed feelings about WikiLeaks… approving of the general concept and trend toward transparency/accountability, while instinctively suspicious toward a rising aroma of hypocrisy and political bias favoring the stinkiest parts of our modern world. Do read this article! Now we know that:

“In Twitter direct messages during the last throes of the US election campaign, released over the past week, WikiLeaks, which US intelligence has deemed a tool of Russian intelligence, attempted to woo Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, with offers of secret collusion.”

“The radical libertarians and the autocrats are allied by virtue of sharing an enemy which is the mainstream, soft, establishment, liberal politics,” said Jamie Bartlett, the director of the centre for the analysis of social media at the Demos think tank. “Most early, hardline cryptographers who were part of this movement in the 1990s considered that democracy and liberty were not really compatible. Like most radical libertarians – as Assange was – the principal enemy was the soft democrats who were imposing the will of the majority on the minority and who didn’t really believe in genuine, absolute freedom.”

The Guardian article goes on to show an extensive network of “libertarians” whose collusion with the Kremlin, as well as other despotic or proto-feudal factions, has been getting ever more blatant and smelly.  Only… note my use of quotation marks around “libertarians”! Alas, this reporter - and almost every other smart observer - is falling for a longstanding trap. One with devastating consequences, in its cleverness.

Think it through. The nightmare of the right is that ten million Americans with libertarian, pro-market enterprise leanings will someday realize that there are no reasons to keep thinking of the Republican Party as “less-terrible” than Democrats.  

The standard narrative is that “liberals like personal freedom” and “conservatives fight for economic freedom.” And as long as the incantation of false equivalence can be maintained, the oligarchs know that most “libertarians” will remain prone to accepting Koch-Murdoch propaganda, hold their noses and vote GOP.

Never mind that in fact market economics are savagely repressed by almost every Republican priority or action, and every single active metric of US national health - especially entrepreneurship, small business, innovation and so - does better across the span of democratic administrations than republican ones. That’s every single such metric.   See: Do Outcomes Matter More than Rhetoric?

 Some libertarians are re-awakening to the fact that their founder - Adam Smith - emphasized the creative power of competition - and not the religious sanctity of property, which he denounced as the worst enemy (if too concentrated) of open-fair competition. Some libertarians have glanced at human history and 6000 years during which the destroyers of flat-fair-creative competition were oligarchs and owner-cheater lords, and not “government bureaucrats."

Yes, generalizations about libertarians come easily, with facile “obviousness.” But attacking them only drives them away from the light, back into Murdoch-Koch arms. 

Try parsing things more clearly. Libertarians who want both freedom and democracy - as well as a vibrant entrepreneurial economy - should be lured into conversation.  

Those who declare that “democracy and freedom are incompatible” are members of the ancient enemy of both, denounced by Smith. They are rushing to throw themselves at the feet of an oligarchy that has only changed a few symbols since King George. They don’t deserve the name “libertarian.” 

== From 9/11 to 11/9  ==

And finally a lesser but still worrisome sickness of the left: 

From 9/11 to 11/9 (the election of President Donald Trump): A short history of World War IV Philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted this 15 years ago: The Western world is waging a long war — against itself.

The 9/11 - 11/9 palindrome is reminiscent of my own rumination that each century's theme becomes apparent about a decade and a half into it.

Back to the article: "Were the shocking attacks of September 2001 and the shocking election result of November 2016 — 9/11 and 11/9, the palindrome that defines our age — fluke occurrences amid the general upward trajectory of Western civilization? Or do they represent, as Baudrillard argued in the first instance, Western civilization’s innate yearning toward its own destruction?"

Goodie. I am reassured. The title sounded sensibly curious and I wondered... is this actual common sense coming from the postmodernist clique? Then I saw the crap about "Western civilization’s innate yearning toward its own destruction?" And I am reinforced in my hatred of these guys, despite even when they seem partly correct.

The "West" is more dynamic and modernist and creative than ever! The problem isn't hatred of "itself." The problem is that we are welded at the hip to a minority of fellow citizens who can only be called "confederate. About a third of these neighbors -- in the U.S. and Europe -- are congenitally terrified of modernity and our willingness to confidently confront change. In America, it is the very same "civil war" that goes back - in phases - to 1778.

These are different parties! The "West" is not so much self-hating as saddled with idiot cousins who are violently hostile to the enlightenment, to science, to all fact-using professions, and to the very thought of incremental progress.

We must not return their hate -- every time the Union defeated a fever of confederate madness, we moved to "charity for all and malice toward none." 

But this will entail first prying our cousins' hands from around our throats and the throat of the Republic. Postmodernist polysyllabic lefty flakes are no help at all.

Voices in AI - and life-extension

 On the crucial and ever-more pertinent topic of AI or Artificial Intelligence, have a look at this Top 10 list: people in AI that you should know.  I’ll copy the list in detail, below. But even the most casual of you will recognize two of the names.

== Drones in the wrong hands ==

After giving talks in DC to several packed halls filled with agency civil servants about “threat and danger horizons,” I encountered this Russian video showing a machine-gun armed quad-copter in action. How long before one of these is used to assassinate somebody?  First use will likely lead to the banning, then tight regulation of drones in the US. 

The irony?  We’ll likely be safer in a world of many drones in private hands. Because civilians who see bad actor drones will likely dive their own drones into them. (I referred to this in EXISTENCE.) We need to remember, when it comes to dual use technologies that our safety depends only partly on restrictions - or on a vigilant protector caste (PC).  Over the long run, what will make the crucial difference is a high ratio of good practitioners to bad tech users. 

Keeping that ratio high-and-rising is going to be as important as any investment in the Protector Caste. They complement each other.

== Peak oil… by outgrowing it? ==

Speaking of whales, here’s a quote from energy expert Amory Lovins about how quickly an industry can change:  "In the 1850s, whalers—America’s fifth-largest industry—were astounded to run out of customers before they ran out of whales," he writes.

Among the factors that Lovins weighs: “the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons remains an order of magnitude better than that of the best batteries envisioned today, though electric cars use that energy far more efficiently.”

== People Most Watched by the AI Elite ==

Back to our lead-in story. These are the ten folks who the most selective experts in Artificial Intelligence pay attention to -- that is, according to the network tracking service Little Bird.

1. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla; co-founder of Open AI, a new organization dedicated to making sure AI is beneficial to humanity. Elon is the person most followed by the AI thought leaders. 

2. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future.  

3. Gary Marcus, CEO of Geometric Intelligence, Professor of Psychology & Neural Science, at NYU.

4. Ben Goertzel, founder of OpenCog, is a prolific advocate for an open source artificial intelligence network.

5. David Brin futurist, blogger, and author with a new book coming out in March called Insistence of Vision, which he says "will open doorways into possible (and mind-blowing) tomorrows and alternate realities.”

6. Randy Olson, data scientist researching AI, master curator of great content related to AI, data visualization and more.  

7. Peter Xing, intrapreneur at Deloitte and co-founder of TranshumanismAU, an Australian organization that aims to enhance the human biological condition.

8. Nikola Danaylov is a Singularity-minded public intellectual and host of the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. 

9. Rodney Brooks, CTO of Rethink Robotics, a company that makes robots that collaborate with humans.

10. Rod Furlan, a Singularity University alum who’s the founder of Lucidscape, a company "building a new kind of massively-distributed 3D simulation engine to power the vast network of interconnected virtual worlds.”

“Follow these people,” Sayeth the Little Bird site, “or ignore them, at your own peril.”

== Paints Preserve Us! ==

The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) has awarded a prize to a team that used polymers to stabilize all the cell’s in a mouse brain so it could be cryo frozen without (much) damage.  This will supposedly preserve the location and strength of every neural synapse or the “connectome” which some believe will be enough to allow accurate modeling of all of a suspended person’s thoughts and memories.  Note that the goal is no longer to make the organic brain come alive again, itself. I still deem this approach problematic though.

1) There is evidence that the synapse is not everything. There are signs of substantial intra-cellular computing.

2) The need for freezing at cryo temperatures still leaves the stored brains very vulnerable across a century or more. The "preservation" thing will only become credible when you can put grandpa's fully plasticized head on the mantle - at room temperature. (See this depicted in my just-published collection of stories, Insistence of Vision.)

== Inheritance just got weirder and more like the New Testament ==

Epigenetics is revealing how experiences endured by a child can sometimes affect his/her sperm and /or ova in ways that then are inherited in a somewhat 'Lamarkian' fashion, by the kids of those kids or even grandkids. Changes in regulatory chemistry, rather than the basic DNA code, itself. 

In this study we see a small, isolated Norwegian region that had cycles of starvation and excess that are very well documented.  It appears to be the latter - years when good harvests led to records of "gluttonous" over eating - that apparently had the most severe effects on lifespans, two generations later!  

Studying the massive regulatory stew of the human epigenome will dwarf the Human Genome Project: "…the human genome contains something like 25,000 genes; it took $3 billion to map them all. The human epigenome contains an as yet unknowable number of patterns of epigenetic marks ... certainly in the millions. A full epigenome map will require major advances in computing power. When completed, the Human Epigenome Project (already under way in Europe) will make the Human Genome Project look like homework that 15th century kids did with an abacus."

Almost yearly, scientists announce one more intervention that “increases the lifespan of mice by 25%” or more.  Caloric restriction, various nutrients, blood exchanges with younger animals… and now by killing off “senescent cells” that have stopped all active division processes.  Eliminate those cells and the mouse not only lives longer but appears younger… (much the way Larry Niven portrayed something similar, in RINGWORLD.)  Scientists discovered that senescent cells secrete a tumor-suppressing protein – hence they rewrote part of the mouse’s genetic code to produce the protein caspase when they begin secreting p16—this acts as a kill-switch, which prompts that cell to die.  Clever. 

But also simple, and hence it qualifies as “low hanging fruit.” Any species that desperately needs to switch to a longer lifespan – as we did, half a million or so years ago – is likely to stumble onto this method and hence I’ll bet they’ll find we already do something like this.  See my essay on why we’ll have to find some more difficult and un-natural things, to get real lifespan extension for us already long lived humans. 

 == Science & Tech news ==

Finally, a truly non-volatile memory storage system, laser etching inside disks of pure quartz - could have an indefinitely long lifespan. 

Meanwhile. A Harvard team have devised a way to make virtually any shape out of a flat sheet of paper, using a fundamental origami or tessellation fold.

Google's Project Loon has been doing R&D on a fleet of interconnected, autonomous, cheap balloons that will soon fly high above commercial jets providing ultra cheap internet access all over the world. This is just one of several endeavors that promise an important open door to the world and cosmos for billions. 

The EHang184 quadcopter isn’t exactly your flying car. But it’s a step closer. One-person passenger hauling by an autonomous drone. 

A nice interview with my friend Vint Cerf.

Alex Steffen, late of Worldbuilding.org, has a new kickstarted project: Our Heroic Future - that I have supported, launching the live-performance talk trend some way beyond the TED standard of a mere inspiring 18 minutes. He intends "a remarkable three-part live documentary. Each 90-minute show is centered around a talk, incorporating stage presentation, film and photography, visual design and motion graphics, sound, music and lighting to tell a powerful story of where we are, where we can go, and what it could be like when we get there."  Give it a look. Sure it's similar to things I've been doing. But there's a huge need for future-can-do tent meetings!  Revivals of our most important faith... belief in ourselves and our children.

Google wants to work with university researchers on short-term projects involving the use of its software and technologies in emerging Internet of things applications.

As every other part of optics shrank, the focusing lens – and the necessary space behind it – remained bulky and heavy, especially on space probes and our portable devices. Now comes a flat, lensless array of several million pinholes, giving new impetus behind the oldest principle in optics, opening an amazing diversity of possibilities.

Humans and Neanderthals may have interbred 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.  There may have been a small admixture exodus of African humans long before the main wave emerged. Here’s a better article. 

and about space...

Located about 300 million light-years away in the Coma Cluster, a record-breaking supermassive black hole weighs in at twenty-one billion times the mass of the Sun, several thousand times larger than the mammoth that lurks at the core of our own galaxy.  Long ago, it would have been a quasar. The accretion disc around the black hole would have emitted up to a thousand times the energy output of the Milky Way.

Mapping  asteroids is important to our future - or discovering threats to it. The B612 Foundation plays an important role in this effort. As it progresses, the distribution of discovered objects appears to be pretty much as expected, except in one zone. Close to the Sun. 

== The incredible forgiveness of our fellow creatures ==

I’ve long been fascinated by the ability and willingness of higher animals to parse among and between humans. Of course we know dogs and cats and horses do this, on a personal level. But then there are the whales and dolphins and sea lions who will flee some ships on sight, but approach others either to play or (alas, often) to beg help with a problem, e.g. cutting them free of a tangled fishing net. 

Elephants are special in almost every way. They know that some humans are waging terrible war upon them, poachers slaying them out of greed for ivory.  Yet, they have been known to flee in the direction of game wardens. And last year, in apparent proof of advanced linguistic and memory abilities, a bull who had never been to an animal rescue center led a wounded comrade there, somehow (presumably) having learned of it second-hand.

Now see this video about a matriarchal herd that annually migrates, utterly peacefully, through the lobbyof a tourist hotel, to munch on fruits in the yard beyond. It is elevating – even uplifting – to realize that we are not hated, as a species.  Animals seem to know that we are varied.  And at our best, we are capable of being friends. 

(In EARTH see the self-contained story of a brave young man’s confrontation with a merchant of animal death.  And in INSISTENCE OF VISION, several tales featuring “Elepents” – redesigned as the perfect workers in space.)

== And finally ==

Share  20 Jokes That Only Intellectuals Will Understand. Some are pretty good!

Preserving our right to look back...

Worrisome. A recent article, The War on Cameras, in Reason details police threats, phone confiscations, detentions, felony charges and convictions of citizens for the 'crime' of recording officers on duty. Yet, laws are vague and vary greatly from state to state. The central issue revolves around whether taping police without their consent is a violation of wiretapping statues, and whether police have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public encounters with citizens—or if they are to be held accountable for their actions on the job.

We've discussed this here before.  Yes, a recent Supreme Court case appears to have settled this matter, in principle. The imbalance of power between individual and state is so huge that the citizen must -- must -- retain the one thing that equalizes the playing field somewhat.  The truth.

In practice, this will still be a hard fight.  I tend to worry much less about restricting what the government and other elites can see (how you gonna stop em?) than about preserving our right to look back!

But can we look?  Really?  We have the illusion of choice…but six media giants now control a staggering 90% of what we read, watch or listen to, in the U.S. These companies are: CBS, Viacom, Disney, GE, News Corp (which includes Fox and the Wall Street Journal) and Time Warner (which includes CNN, HBO, Time and Warner Bros). The largest owner of radio stations in the U.S., Clear Channel, operates 1,200 stations, airing shows by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity, with programs syndicated to more than 5,000 stations. And who owns Clear Channel? Bain Capital purchased Clear Channel shortly before Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential bid.  One clear reason why conservative talk show hosts support Mitt? And weren't we supposed to be more independent and broad in in our access to information, by now?

Well, at least now we know who to blame for what's happened to the History Channel.

A horrifying brain drain. “At some Ivy League schools last year, up to half of the graduates went into finance or consulting, a move that could have a profound effect on the economy in the years to come.”  Crum, any civilization that does this to itself deserves what will happen next. The very brightest, who do NOT fall for this trap will simply leave the country. A genuine “brain drain.” Leaving the finance twits in charge of a society that explores nothing, invents nothing, produces nothing except paper short-term-parasitic profits. Ever hear of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark? Think about it.

Self censorship? Social media giant Twitter announced they would block messages on a country by country basis, to “to withhold content from users in a specific country while making it available to the rest of the world.” This policy will allow Twitter to grow internationally into countries with "different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression", but won’t affect China or Iran where Twitter is already completely blocked.

An unprecedented loss of Arctic sea ice over the last few decades suggests we may soon see an ice-free Arctic summer. But then, as I have linked many times before, the US Navy has long known this and is making major plans. So are the Russians. Maybe THAT will get through to your crazy uncle.

Digital thievery is rampant! Have a look at the precautions that US corporate officers, scientists and government officials have started taking, before getting on a plane to China.  “If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated,” said Joel F. Brenner, former counterintelligence specialist. We're not enemies!  But things are passing through a phase where it just makes sense to be careful.  You'll actually get more respect when they know you're smart enough to protect yourself and your endeavors. Seriously, read the description of what a cautious businessman does to stay digitally clean and no bring home spyware.

The media does seem to have a polarizing effect…Would ANY new data make you change your opinions on hot button issues such as the death penalty, abortion, same sex marriage, legalization of marijuana? Or God? Or the fact that US taxes are near a 100 year low? Any data at all? Read about opinions beyond the reach of data.

Cadmium, a carcinogen and neurotoxin, may be as hazardous to children as lead. Current regulations are based on threats to adults; recent studies show possible links with learning disabilities and retardation in children.

== Better Accountability through Visualizing our World==

Shining a light into the darkness: I knew I liked the guy, despite resenting the soul-sold handsomeness... The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), begun by George Clooney, is an attempt to use technology to deter civil war and atrocities against citizens in Sudan. SSP combines satellite images and field reports with Google Maps to track movements of troops and displaced people, bombed villages, mass graves and other evidence of large-scale violence, providing public access to updated information on these long-suffering areas.

An ever-reddening glow: NASA video depicts global temperature data over the past 130 years.

Speaking of heating... this map shows hot spots for terrorist attacks within the U.S.--a third of attacks occur in urban areas.

How is water used worldwide? Researchers map a global water footprint detailing water usage. 92% goes to growing food, 40% toward the export of products.

Satellite data reveal the extent of China's air pollution problem--finding dangerous levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5, less than 2.5  microns).

Accountability on a local basis: the energy usage of New York’s buildings, visualized.

When 30,000 square feet isn't enough...aerial views of mega-mansions. Even as the size of the average American house shrinks after peaking during the boom, several of the wealthy are building gigantic homes of 20,000 square feet and more.

==On the Technology Front==
 Virtual devices will read your hand motions and gestures and provide what you want—meaning technology will appear even more like…magic. If you hold up your hand, a map or keypad will appear, for you to retrieve or send data. Sensors on the ceiling will monitor your gestures, and respond.  I portray this in Existence…

CleanSpace One, an $11 million “Janitor Satellite” under development in Switzerland, would be the first of a series of craft launched to clear orbital debris, grabbing items with its robotic arm.  Read a better method in chapter one of my next novel.

Patrick Tucker suggests that Artificial Intelligence will be America’s next Big Thing, directing traffic, managing electrical grids and resources, aiding doctors, lawyers and police, analyzing satellite data, optimizing manufacturing and design, developing new medicines and cures, leading to a third Industrial Revolution. Yet, the roboticization of the factory floor will have human costs, as well. See Making it in America in The Atlantic.

Researchers make iron invisible to X-rays, using quantum interference.

==Miscellaneous Fiction/Film==

I'm quoted in this article on Prophets of Science Fiction--about the interplay between science and Sci Fi.

A few sci-fi-ish films from this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Eeeek!  A “re-imagining” remake of the worst sci fi pile of drivel ever made... Space 1999!

Fascinating perspectives from Jonathan Dotse - an IT student, blogger, and science fiction writer based in Accra, Ghana. He discusses the future of African science fiction.

How does Science Fiction influence Public perception of science topics such as Genetic engineering, cloning, nanotechnology? See an article in Biology in Science Fiction.

Glimpse this new Nigerian sci fi film! Kajola.

Seriously? Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In this movie, that axe isn’t just for chopping down trees… and it looks as if it just might (unbelievably) be worth checking out!

Russian speakers, see a translation of my essay about The Uplift War.

Enough of a coolstuff dump for ya?  Well... the year has just begun…

Final note: I am among those interviewed onscreen for "First Contact" - a show that will appear on the Science Channel on March 13 and March 20.  Very relevant as to whether humanity will get to continue its... existence.