The Roots…and Future... of Humanity

== Digging into the roots of humanity ==

In a study conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and the University of Cologne, it was found that the children of obese mothers who subsisted on a high-fat diet during the course of their pregnancy are at a higher risk for obesity and related metabolic disorders all their lives.

But help is on the way!  The world's first genetically modified babies have been born -- with genes from three parents. This news is not quite as big as it sounds.  The third parent only contributed the mitochondria of the fertilized egg, so no meddling in the chromosomal "human DNA" parts happened.  Still, it is a milestone.

More meddlesome methods are coming! Utilizing the he CRISPR/Cas9 method, RNA can be specifically designed to cut a particular part of the genome, allowing specific genes to be targeted. Once cut, the gene can be knocked out or replaced with a slightly different copy to replace faulty ones with healthy copies. Now, in China, this method has been used to alter the first "GM monkeys."

And in the same … vein… researchers at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) have developed a robotic “nanobiopsy” system that can extract tiny samples from inside a living cell without killing it. The single-cell nanobiopsy technique is a powerful tool for scientists working to understand the dynamic processes that occur within living cells. While the therapeutic and scientific uses are huge, it might also affect the Singularity Movement… by determining whether or not intracellular computing  takes place to any large degree.  If it does, then the dream of replicating human cognition in-silico may be many more Moore's Law doublings away.

And what about those human roots? As few as 300 matings could have inserted the Neanderthal heritage in the genome of the common ancestors of Europeans and East Asians. The strongest remnant of our Neanderthal heritage appears to be centered around as-yet unknown changes in skin and hair that likely proved advantageous. 

Take a look at this video showing one anthropologist's best reconstructions for the evolution of the human face over seven million years.

Where are we headed? The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, explores the  threats humanity faces now…and in the future. In fact, even if humanity does mark the "anthropocene" with devastation through nature, there have been five preceding MAJOR mass extinctions… but very many more of lesser types. Frankly, I am amazed that by 2014 the worst forecasts have not (yet?) come true.  Are we in the process of wising up in time?  You gotta hope so.  You gotta work to make it so.

Of course, remamber we can be replaced! With a plummeting shrimp industry, fishermen in the US southeast are throwing nets to collect… jellyfish. Certain types that are loved by Asian countries… and by sea turtles… are being harvested by the kilotons. As the seas appear to be trending more friendly to jellies and less so for fish. (As I portray in Existence.) Let's consider before thoughtlessly changing the Earth too much.

And finally… while we're on the bio-news… why has the rate of abortions in the US declined so steeply?  Explanations range from interesting to flat-out absurd.

== Technology! ==

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used as a potential therapeutic tool to control and train specific targeted brain regions. A new brain-imaging technique enables people to ‘watch’ their own brain activity in real time and to control or adjust function in pre-determined brain regions.  Will this finally lead to those excellent teaching-games  we were promise 20 years ago?

This animation of a mouse brain looks like driving down a highway and watching buildings on the roadside appearing, becoming larger, and then shrinking in the rearview.

From Elon Musk: Forward-looking Innovations that will change our future.

As crystalline silicon module prices crashed in recent years, developers and installers benefitted greatly from the low prices and sudden economic feasibility of solar in new markets. Now attention is paid to reducing racking and mounting cost and microinverters and high-voltage configurations stand to accelerate those reductions.

== Sustaining our world ==

 Cool roofs — painted white or other light colors to reflect sunlight — as well as green (vegetation covered)  roofs have surged in popularity as cities such as New York promote their use and research shows they lower the need for air conditioning. Now comes another federally funded study that reinforces that idea — with caveats.  "Each can completely offset the warming due to urban expansion and can even offset the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions," says the study author.  A newer Berkeley Lab study, published online last month, found white roofs are more cost-effective than black or green ones over a 50-year period when installation, maintenance and a building's subsequent energy use are considered. But that leaves out the edible produce from green roofs!

We've all seen calculations comparing sustainables to fossil fuels… and undeniable is the trend -- much faster than anyone expected -- for solar and wind etc to break even with oil and coal. We should all rejoice (all except the coal and middle-eastern-petro princes)… though I think not without a tinge of gratitude for the biggest thing that fossil fuels gave us: an industrial revolution that lifted billions out of poverty, raising generations of children so comfortable that they could then start contemplating the dismal side effects of over-reliance on fossil fuels!

(If you are unable to appreciate ironies, then you are WAY too dogmatic.  Loosen up.)

But there is one calculation we never see… thermodynamic comparison of the total investment costs of fossil fuels by the Earth, weighing in the inefficiencies of the hundred million years it took to cook each utterly irreplaceable pool of liquid gold down there.  According to this study, solar is better by a ratio of 100,000:1!  All right, that Big Picture Perspective is too grand, even for me.  Still….

== physical stuff! ==

Did Google buy a "quantum computer" that's not-so-quantum, after all?  It's harder than you might think, to tell the difference, at least in these early days.  A month or two ago, preliminary models suggested D-Wave's machine "did the Q."  Now, researchers at IBM reveal it may not necessarily be so.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have invented a plasmonic graphene nano-antenna that can be efficiently used at millimeter radio wavelengths, taking one more step toward smart dust. Utility fog. Programmable matter. Grey and blue goo. Cooperating swarms of micron-sized devices (motes) offer completely new solutions and capabilities that can hardly be imagined. Except… well… by Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear and at least one other science fiction author I could name…

And now some good news? At least under some sets of assumptions and parameters,  the Large Hadron Collider appears to have excluded having seen any signs of the production of micro-black holes.  So… my doom scenario in EARTH is impossible? Reassuring… a little bit.

Can we see inside super-dangerous volcanoes like Vesuvius? Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo reasoned that the throat of a volcano could be "x-rayed" with energetic muons produced in cosmic-ray showers. The number of muons passing through the volcano would depend on the density of intervening rock, so measuring the number of muons passing through various parts of the volcano could yield a crude, 3-D view of the interior.  One of the fellows with a NASA NIAC grant showed us even more spectacular potential uses for this method… a way to peer inside asteroids!

== Astronomy! And space! ==

The oldest star (known so far) in the universe (13.7 billion years) was found using ANU's Skymapper, which has a "unique" ability to "find stars with low iron from their color." This comes in handy for stars such as this one which the astronomers believe to be a "first star" originating from the earliest days of the Big Bang itself.

A new map of asteroids developed by researchers from MIT and the Paris Observatory charts the size, composition, and location of more than 100,000 asteroids throughout the solar system, and shows that "rogue" asteroids are more common than previously thought.

Looking to our future in space: In 2018, NASA hopes to put a rover on the Moon. RESOLVE will sift through the Moon’s regolith (loose surface soil) and heat them up, looking for traces of hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be combined to make water. A similar payload would be attached to Curiosity’s successor, which is currently being specced out by NASA and will hopefully launch in 2020. This second IRSU experiment will probably suck in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, filter out the dust, and then process the CO2 into oxygen.

More about NASA soon, with my report from the annual NIAC Symposium!

== Ah… the climate ==

The US government is creating seven new "climate hubs" that will help everyday people, particularly farmers, handle the effects of global warming, which have recently caused wild gyrations of drought and record temperatures alternating with severe storms and winter plunges -- exactly as the models predicted. Only we should stop calling it Global Warming and use"climate instability."  Let's see the denialists worm their way out of that one. See my article: Perspectives on Climate Change and the Ritualization of Denial.

Satellite observations of global sea-surface temperature have shown that a 30-year upward trend slowed in the last 15 years.  It can't be due to successful mitigation, since outside the United States and a few countries in Europe, CO2 emissions have not dropped back to those levels.  What might it mean? Reports Science2.0: "Climate scientists have been scrambling to explain it and think they have an answer; rearrangement in the energy flow of the climate system and how the ocean stores heat. Scientists have speculated that one of the causes of this ‘plateau’ in sea-surface temperature could be a change in the exchange of ocean water between warm, surface waters and cold, deep waters below 700 m – as if the warming is ‘hiding’ underwater. Temperature measurements at this depth cover a relatively short period.

But the warm water won’t hide below the surface forever: scientists believe that it may re-emerge later or affect other climate indicators, such as sea level or ocean circulation."

Indeed, more and more cracks appear in the Edifice of Deliberate Lobotomization.  For example… Televangelist Pat Robertson reacted Wednesday to the big debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham over the age of the Earth and so on. Robertson actually took issue with one of the central arguments of creationism and said it’s “nonsense” to say the world’s only six thousand years old. He brought up the findings of a bishop centuries ago who came up with that figure and said, “There ain’t no way that’s possible.”

Read the rest… and use it.

== and… ==

The oldest human footprints have been found outside Africa.

Right now, with a couple of exceptions, Africa's population density is relatively low; it's a very big continent more sparsely populated than, say, Europe or East Asia. That's changing very quickly. The continent's overall population is expected to more than quadruple over just 90 years.  The United Nations Population Division, which tracks demographic data from around the world, has dramatically revised its projections for what will happen in the next nine decades. The new statistics, based on in-depth survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, tell the story of a world poised to change drastically over the next several decades.

Will the 21st Century Actually Begin in 2014?

(NOTE: a somewhat expanded version of this speculative essay appeared syndicated on the Bloomberg network, at the very end of 2013.)

……………………..

As if you didn't already have enough to be nervous about, here's something creepy to ponder as the year 2014 gets under way.

This what-if isn't technological, social, political, or even science-fictional. Rather, it’s a bit of wholly unscientific, superstitious pattern-recognition. That the last two centuries (and possibly more) didn't "start" at their official point, the turning of a calendar from 00 to 01. That wasn't when they began in essence, nor when they first bent the arc of history.

No. Each century effectively began in its 14th year.

Think about it. The first decade of the 20th century was filled with hope and a kind of can-do optimism that was never seen again -- not after the horrific events of 1914 shattered any vision that a new and better age would arrive without pain. Yet, until almost the start of World War I, 19th century progress seemed unstoppable and ever-accelerating.

Consider the world of 1913, when regular middle-class folks in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and so on were acquiring unexpected wonders: clothes-washing machines, gas stoves, gas and then electric lighting, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, vaccinations, telephones, radios, gas cooking stoves, motor cars. Stepping outside you would see and hear  human beings flying through the sky!

Science was pouring forth what seemed unalloyed goodness.  New dyes and industrial textiles doubled a working family's access to fresh and beautiful clothes. Cheap iron bedsteads kept cheap spring mattresses clean, making sleep both healthier and far more comfortable. Nations were banning child labor and providing free schooling. Astronomers discovered what galaxies were. Physicists were pushing their pure and harmless science to fantastic frontiers. And the Haber-Bosch process  brought cheap fertilizers that tripled crops, as chemistry proved itself to be everybody's friend.

Think our era is similarly fast-changing? Just compare the kitchen of today with a kitchen of 1950. Sure, everything nowadays is shinier, bigger, smarter. Still, a person from 1950 could use our apparatus with fluid familiarity. But the drudgery-saddled housewife of 1880 would blink in bedazzlement at what her daughter used in 1913, enabling that daughter to start contemplating fulfilling jobs outside the home. Life was changing at a pace never-before seen, and mostly for the better.

Sure, all those techno-advances continued after World War I. Social changes such as women getting the vote were harbingers of more to come. But after 1914, the naiveté was gone. People realized that the 20th century would be one of harsh struggle accompanying every step of advancement. And along the way to hard-won better times, the age would spiral downward first, into the deepest pit that humanity ever knew, before our parents (or grandparents) clawed their way out of the nadir of 1944 -- the focal year of a century that truly began in 1914.

All right, that's just one data point. Is there another? Well, look at 1814, when Napoleon's fall led to the Congress of Vienna and the so-called Concert of Europe that made possible the continent's longest extended period of overall peace, as the great powers turned from fighting bloody wars to perfecting their colonial empires. Or aloof back another hundred years, to when the War of Spanish Succession culminated -- in 1714 -- in what came to be called the "French Century."  In each case, the fourteenth year marked a dramatic shift in tone and theme, so much so that they represented the real beginnings of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

(Indeed, there were major, threshold events in 1414 and 1614… but I am not here to make some case for mystical-numerologiucal patter!  Rather, I have a different point, entirely, as will become clear.)

Suppose the pattern holds -- and remember this is just a thought experiment -- what might it mean about the true 21st century? What theme will typify or represent its arc?

First, let's dismiss one parochial notion -- that the terror attacks of September 2001 were the major break point between centuries. Nonsense. We were engaged in the same struggle before and after. The U.S. shrugged off more damage during any month of World War II. Indeed, nothing could be more “twen-cen” or 20th century than the overwrought hysteria that some (not all) Americans apply to "9/11." Much of the world assigns no particular relevance to that date.

Oh, we are still in the 20th. Consider the pervading doom and gloom we see around us, right now. Post-apocalyptic tales and dystopias fill our fiction, films and politics, especially the Young Adult genre where today's teens seem terminally allergic to stories containing hope. How very `60s. And `70s. … and so on.

There was a similar sense of apocalypse in 1813 Europe, but at least there were good reasons, after decades of ferocious struggle that seemed poised to last forever. What excuse do we have, in a time when per capita violence has been plummeting for decades? When the fraction of kids -- worldwide -- who are well-fed and in school is higher than ever?  Sure, the planet faces dire problems. But the things keeping us from addressing pollution, oppression, climate change and all of that are political inanities. The War on Science that has hobbled innovation, for example, can be won if we do one thing -- tell the gloomcasters of both left and right to get out of our way and let us get back to problem-solving.

Indeed, the only real obstruction we seem to face is a dullard-sickness of attitude, dismally ignoring every staggering accomplishment since 1945. Hence the question: Is it possible that a new theme for our 21st century requires only that we snap out of our present funk?

If only. That would truly be the Dawning of an Age of Aquarius, forecast by hippies long before the old 20th was anywhere near done with us, but arriving at last. You shake your heads, but it could happen.

We can still choose our own fate. Next year, we might decide to cheer up and rediscover the can-do optimism that was crushed by the tsar and kaiser and a small group of insipid, inbred monarchs, exactly 100 years ago.

We could choose to become problem-solvers, in part, because (let's imagine) someone in 2014 discovers a simple, cheap and safe IQ-boosting pill letting millions finally see past their hypnotizing dogmas. Or suppose politicians decide to get over their self-serving snits and resume the adult craft of negotiation. Or some cable news owner decides to rediscover citizenship. Or some brave director releases an inspiring film that astounds people with an unexpected idea called hope.

Or else... go ahead and wallow in the obvious notion that 2014 will see a violent ruction of its own. A phase transition into a century whose theme we'll all regret. Or we’ll see a continuing retreat from confident civilization, a turning away from the Enlightenment Dream, relapsing into fearful obeisance to a leader, or New Lords, or some simplistic ideal.

That, too, could take place. In which case, please don't give me any prediction points. All I did was spot a pattern. I don't want respect from a people who would allow something like that to happen.

…..

--Reprinted from: What If the 21st Century Begins in 2014? in Bloomberg Press.

Fight Back Against One-Way Surveillance!

… first a couple of transparency-related announcements.

THEWORLDPOST looks like a bold endeavor -- a joint effort of the Berggruen Institute and the Huffington Post -- to create a news and opinion site suitable for people who might actually influence events.  Launched at Davos… it contains in one of its inaugural issues my appraisal of the NSA Imbroglio and how to fix it: Check NSA Surveillance with Citizen Sous-veillance -- monitoring from below.

Specifically, I dissect the 46 proposals made by the Presidential Commission and divide them into three categories… those that are for show, those that set up decent procedures… and those that might actually work, helping us achieve the win-win of a positive sum outcome -- preserving both freedom and public safety.

The European magazine ran an op-ed in which I tried (for the upteenth time) to explain the difference between two methods of keeping freedom -- hiding from Big Brother… or holding Big Brother accountable. And I will keep trying to explain till it sinks in.

Do see the end of this missive for more links to media that are paying attention to what might work.

== More transparency insights ==

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Though these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses, even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements.

And the debate continues, with this fascinating Pew Poll result: A majority of Americans now believe total anonymity is a pipe dream, despite wishing it were otherwise.

An excellent TED Radio Hour on NPR discusses many parameters for "The End of Privacy," and refreshingly only includes one of the typical whiners demanding "don't look at me!" without offering any clue how that might happen.  Instead, most of the speakers addressed how we might surf this new wave as knowing, assertive citizens. Yay NPR.

Still, occasionally something practical comes along to help individuals assert a little power over their own lives… here's an Android App that warns when you're being watched.

Just remember that each pragmatic measure of concealment will be temporary!  For example: Through a Scanner Darkly:  NameTag is an app for Google Glass that offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. When you snap a photo of a passerby -- the image is sent to the company’s database. When a match is located, the ID loads in front of your left eye -- personal data that might include the stranger's name, occupation, Facebook profile…and possible records in the national sex-offender registry.  Of course Google disowns any relationship and discourages face-recog.  But the world of EXISTENCE is on its way….

…at which point your best hope will not be to hide… but to detect and know who is staring at you.

And they will stare!  From a vantage of 10,000 feet, the US Army's experimental aerostat (unmanned blimp) will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital. Tested in Afghanistan and along the U.S. border with Mexico, these systems are becoming vastly more capable.  In this test, only radar and not cameras will aim Earthward.  But be ready for the future.  And hiding will not be an option.  Save your anger and militancy for what matters. Again… nothing will stop us from being looked at.  We need to demand ways to look back.

Ah...  Aerial surveillance ... at 1.8 gigapixel resolution.

== On the horizon ==

Bruce Schneier suggests that the coming "Internet of Things" will open upon a whole new world… universe… of places for clever hackers to get into our systems.  Why bother trying to penetrate our computers, when so much is in the cloud and in the back and forth that we send-receive?  Schneier suggests we’re in for a security disaster as hackers figure out that it’s easier to hack routers than computers.  Worse, routers are made cheaply, at low margins, by companies that have no inventive to made them interactively update their security… the way Apple or Dell or Microsoft set up your home computer to do.  "The result is hundreds of millions of devices that have been sitting on the Internet, unpatched and insecure, for the last five to ten years."

"And the Internet of Things will only make this problem worse, as the Internet — as well as our homes and bodies — becomes flooded with new embedded devices that will be equally poorly maintained and unpatchable."

A very good point.  Bruce is at his best doing this.  Pointing to new technologies or else a lazy trend and (when he stays practical, without arm waved generalities) saying we need to talk about this thing here.

Okay, this is going to change those Hollywood chase scenes. The European Union is secretly developing a "remote stopping" device to be fitted to all cars that would allow the police to disable vehicles at the flick of a switch from a control room. Urgh.  Oh no you don't!  Not till we get people of our own in the control rooms! (This innovation brought to you by those UFO aliens who want to stop us all from using vehicles to escape the zombie apocalypse.)

An interesting and refreshing "yes, but…" turning of a mirror on a tell-all tattle-tale.  Mind you, there are good reasons to wish the TSA would just go… improve a bit.  But always look at the messenger, as well.

== More Brin-snippets ==

This 10 minute podcast -- The Role of the Internet in the Future -- about Transparency and why the Internet Miracle happened -- is one of the best excerpts from an interview I gave a European television station during a recent conference in Lithuania on the digital future.

Another excerpt -- On Openness, Privacy and Surveillance -- explains the most difficult concept of the information age… yes… once more time hammering on what ought to be obvious. That we should stop whining about how much elites can see… and instead be militant about looking back at them. And yes, I suppose the number of times and places listed here -- where media have asked me to explain this -- may in itself be cause for optimism!  I hadn't thought of that, till now.  Perhaps, indeed, it's getting through.

And this one -- Technologies Making a Difference in the Future -- talks about technological advances that have expanded what human beings can see, know, and touch.

== World Don't-Look-At-Us Day ==

On Tuesday -- February 11 -- the Electronic Frontier Foundation will join thousands of other websites and organizations -- plus millions of individuals -- in an Internet-wide digital protest, demanding an end to mass surveillance: The Day We Fight Back. Visitors will be prompted to contact members of the U.S. Congress or sign a global petition opposing mass surveillance with a banner that can be inserted into any site.

Let me be clear where I stand on this: "The Day We Fight Back" is an important event in one (and only one) way… in that it will provide society's elites with a metric for how seriously the  public takes the matter of non-symmetric transparency… the kind that only shines down upon the people with surveillance. I urge you all to take part, sign petitions and all of that.  Better yet, fork over a few bucks! Join EFF and ACLU and other orgs who offer to amplify your voice through the democratizing and equalizing miracle of proxy power activism.

Nevertheless… I do feel compelled to add this.  A measure of general public displeasure is ALL that this event will accomplish, for one simple reason. Our most vocal defenders of privacy and liberty -- like EFF and the ACLU -- are perfectly right to declare that these precious things are under threat! But those defenders remain generally clueless about what measures - specifically - have a snowball's chance of making a difference. Which steps might offer any hope at all, or any possibility of helping to stave off Big Brother.

"Don't look at us!" That is the reflex response to surveillance -- not just by governments but also corporate, aristocratic, criminal, technological and foreign elites. And it's worthwhile joining in that shout, as a conversation-starter. But there is not one example from human history when whining ever worked.

There is another way -- emphasizing our power to see and supervise and watch the watchmen. Sousveillance is the answer to surveillance.  The EFF and ACLU should be part of shifting the specific, militant demand -- not to blind our professional Protector Caste (which cannot even conceivably work) but to apply fierce supervision, which might render their omniscience powerless to  actually harm us.

Alas, I must again lament: this concept has proved almost impossible to convey or teach. And so we are left with the sole solution on the table.  To complain… and to hope that the Powers will be nice. That they will listen and nod agreeably and promise to stop looking… just a little.  For a little while.

Again, please join us all on February 11, sign petitions… and join the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I may disagree about some tactics and roadmaps.  But the intensity of our desire for freedom must be made clear!

A Plague of Outrage

A while back, I referred to this book: “The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility” by Jeffrey M. Barry and Sarah Sobieraj.  An interesting rumination on how political disagreements unfold in American media can be found in Salon Online: How Right-wing Media Spiraled out of control, excerpted from the book. Skim past a lengthy and somewhat tendentious introduction about Michelle Bachman, and head to the meat, where the authors suggest that our current Era of Outrage is rather unprecedented and driven by deliberate incitement in media that are out of all proportion or control.

Especially interesting is a historical survey of how TV news used to be a forum for consensus and how shows like William F. Buckley's Firing Line encouraged debate that was constructive and mostly civil:

"Firing Line emerged in the context of these dramatic and often divisive events. The program was a one-hour debate-style public affairs show hosted by conservative William F. Buckley, during which Buckley posed challenging questions of the day to high-profile guests ranging from Hugh Hefner to Noam Chomsky. The interviews were interesting, with a more adversarial tone than found in network news and yet markedly more civilized than today’s cable news analysis shows. Questions were thoughtful, answers tended to be substantive, and those involved treated one another respectfully. Disagreement was ever present, but disparagement was rare.

“Firing Line” is noteworthy not only because it created space for extended exchange of political opinion on television, but also because it aired for over 30 years. “Agronsky and Company,” which debuted a few years later, but had less durability, also began to offer opinion-laden public affairs programming on television with a recurring slate of combatants who would reliably disagree with more personality than was typical of other news-based content of the time, though still in a far more respectful manner than is characteristic in similar formats in the outrage era."

It is an interesting essay by Berry and Sobieraj -- a chapter from their book -- though I might demur from some of its assertions… e.g. that there was not an Outrage Industry in earlier eras.  One has only to look at the almost uniformly noxious press that fomented treason in the South before the Civil War. (Newspapers that drifted from the Slave-o-crats' party line were burned.  Indeed, the principal complaint and grievance mentioned in nearly all documents declaring secession was fury over the stubborn refusal of Northern states to quell freedom of press and close down abolitionist papers.)

Other periods saw the swell and fume of "yellow journalism"  that stoked bitter rage and stymied sober debate. Indeed, one of these intervals encompassed the first two decades of the American Republic.

Still, the authors' point is well-made. We boomers grew up in a golden age of journalism that, ironically, was undermined by the generally wondrous advances in electronic media that have freed us to wander out of the paternalistic firelight of journalist-professionals.  Inevitably, along with the good aspects (e.g. being able to research any topic independently and gather points of view from all over the globe) we have also seen wretched things like the consolidation of millions of rivetted followers, stoked on monochrome opinion and hate, via subsidized cable and radio "news." Systems that create, in effect diatribe-based  "nuremberg rallies". Given the addictive allure of indignation -- and freed from any Fairness Doctrine requirement to show all sides -- we had all the ingredients for a genuine plague of outrage.

Have a look and then grasp that this destruction of adult discourse in the United States was almost entirely deliberate, sabotaging the political negotiation and problem-solving systems that had served the republic for two centuries.  There is no clearer case of treason.

== A case in point ==

David Frum is far from the cleverest of the high-IQ-but-dingbat students of Leo Strauss who came to be known as "neo-cons" in the late 1990s and early 2000s,  members of an arrogant-triumphalist wing of conservatism who thought they ruled the roost, amid the dawning years of the George W. Bush presidency. In those heady times, especially right after the events of 9/11 filled them with a bracing sense of mission and empowerment, men like Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman concocted grand rationalizations for why America should rush to do what it had sworn never to do again, after Vietnam -- plunging into vast, decadal, land-wars of insurgency in Asia. Two such wars, pouring arterial gushers of national wealth, prestige, honor and lives into distant desert sands. Wars that left the battlefield s owned by bitter foes of the U.S.

It was the coterie of neocons who provided grand, Straussian incantations, proclaiming for America a sense of imperial mission -- not the mild-consensus Pax Americana designed by Marshall, Acheson, Truman and Eisenhower, but an aggressively-resolute, romanesque imperium, unashamedly applying Manichaean power to transform the world any way their dear leader - George Bush - desired.

And if those lunges into middle-eastern quicksand happened to be exactly what Osama bin Laden and every enemy of the U.S. wanted us to do? Especially a certain petro-kingdom whose influence over the Dear Leader was near-total, and who also provided most of the 9/11 attackers?  No matter.  It is a tragedy of human existence that (as we also saw among the communists) high IQs and the ability to craft polysyllabic conjurations offer no protection against irony.

It can be hard to look back a whole ten years or more to the heyday and then sudden collapse of neoconservatism, but in retrospect we can see it as a shining era for the last intellectuals of the American Right. At last, they had their revenge upon those Che-tee-shirt-wearing leftist students who had trashed their offices and driven them away from real universities, into the welcoming arms of faux-academies like Heritage… where they willingly crafted whatever rationalizations that were asked of them.  In those heady times, they could ignore the grave spinning of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, as every principle of true, erudite conservatism was handily reversed.

Sic transit gloria. By 2004, the neocons had been tossed aside like used tissue, as their nerdiness grew vexing to Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Verbose concoctions -- even crazy ones -- no longer fit the narrative that all smartypants types are enemies. From scientists to teachers, medical doctors, journalists, economists, civil servants, law professionals, skilled labor, professors… name one exception… the populist, know-nothing theme on Fox and Right-Radio became hate all elites except the rich.  And yes, that applied even to intellectual courtesans of the no-longer "neo" right. Most of whom slunk away into obscurity, once more --

-- but not David Frum, who has spent recent years inveighing against the lobotomization of his movement.  Far from converting to liberalism, Frum has been among those on the American right with the guts to stand up to Rupert Murdoch, joining others at The American Conservative in appraising what went wrong, how it all got hijacked, and how to rescue something from the murdochian flames.

Frum's latest sally is interesting, an appeal for the reader to look back to the roots of the "left-right" axis and terms like "liberal" and "conservative. In particular, he points to the debates between English parliamentarian Edmund Burke and Anglo-American polemicist Thomas Paine. Frum argues that gradually (I would say recently, and in large part because of the neocons) the entire meaning of Conservatism has undergone a process of reversal, so that many of the virtues professed by Burke are now rejected utterly, in Tea Party America.

I do not endorse all… or even most … of the insights offered by Mr. Frum.  But I found them interesting and a welcome (if brief) look back to days when "conservative" and "intellect" weren't antonyms.

== Conservative media in turmoil ==

Continuing on this… I oft remark that Arizona and New York are drawing copious electricity from coils arranged around the spinning in the graves of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., both of whom growled and denounced the trends that were hijacking their beloved -- (and once-upon-a-time intellectual) -- movement.  Now it seems that New York can crank up their power draw a bit…

"The National Review magazine, longstanding house news organ of the establishment right, is facing a lawsuit that could shutter the publication (originally founded by Buckley with money he inherited) permanently. According to The Week, a suit by a climate scientist threatens to bankrupt the already financially shaky publication and its website, the National Review Online (NRO)."

So are we stuck with Fox News to represent the undead, were-thing that has taken over the American right?

As I mentioned above, have a look at the manifesto of The American Conservative, a journal that appears to be trying hard to resurrect the notion of a US conservative movement that argues constructively with their liberal neighbors, without kowtowing to a far right that is controlled by plutocrats and worshippers of aristocracy.

The American Conservative will not be a liberal's cup of tea! Indeed, it still lapses often into rants that betray its roots in a co-founder… one Patrick Buchanon. I do not promise more than one article in ten will rise above baloney.  But even that ratio 'be a blessing,' nowadays… and some of you, propelled (as I am) by curiosity and a desire to hear all sides, will drop in, now and then.

There are embers and glimmers of sanity among our neighbors over there!  Don't denigrate.  Help our "ostrich conservative" friends and neighbors to lift their heads and gradually move away from Fox-induced mania. Help fan the flames of a rebellion against the monsters who have hijacked the once intellectually cogent movement of Buckley and Goldwater.

== More on Divisive Politics ==

What's behind this modern plague of political wrath? Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, best known for his “moral foundations” theory,  has applied science to  appraising why differences in personality and choice of moral foundations affect the more superficial political leanings of liberals, conservatives and libertarians.  It's actually quite fascinating and sufficiently neutral that most liberals and conservatives nod and say "yeah, that's me."

Climate change: another divisive topic. See this fascinating discussion of how the rapidly changing Arctic will provoke a cascade of secondary effects, from conflicts over resources in the Arctic Shelf to shipping changes to the release of trillions of pounds of methane from melting permafrost.  There are no Naval officers who deny climate change. All are aware that conservatism no longer connects to our strategic needs at any points of overlap.

Welcome to the future? See: The Poor Deserve Equal Protection by the Law:  "Businesses and economic elites in developing countries left frustrated by incompetent police, clogged courts and hopelessly overburdened judges and prosecutors are increasingly circumventing these systems and buying their own protection. In India in late 2010 the private security industry already employed more than 5.5 million people — roughly four times the size of the entire Indian police force. A 2009 World Bank report showed roughly the same ratio in Kenya. The largest employer in all of Africa is a private security firm, Group4Securicor, and in Guatemala, private security forces outnumber public police 7 to 1."

Do we want that for our world?

The Latest on Time Travel. An ironic title for news about weird S**T

All right, this is going to get a bit dense and weird, as we glimpse discussions of time travel.  But first... a string of wonderfully interesting bits of science news!

== Is each neuron a quantum computer? ==

The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons appears to corroborate claims that consciousness derives from deeper-level, finer-scale activities inside brain neurons. The eminent mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose in the 1990s suggested that quantum vibrational computations in microtubules were “orchestrated” (“Orch”) by synaptic inputs and memory stored in microtubules.  They may be the seat of stored information that neurons (and glia exchanges) intermediate.  Moreover, in a new development it is thought that Microtubule quantum vibrations (e.g. in the megahertz frequency range) appear to interfere and produce much slower EEG “beat frequencies.”

In Consciousness in the universe: A review of the 'Orch OR' theory, Penrose and Hameroff suggest, “Consciousness depends on anharmonic vibrations of microtubules inside neurons, similar to certain kinds of Indian music, but unlike Western music, which is harmonic."  

How cool and weird!  Only I am less interested in the mystical implications about roots of consciousness than whether this nails in "intracellular computing" as a major part of brain function. 

If so, then that boosts by many orders of magnitude how many transactions take place to comprise our minds.  And many more Moore's Law doublings will be needed before that number can be replicated, in silicon.

Is that good news or bad news?  Will this delay the arrival of friendly machines who will solve our problems and help us become better, too?  Or will it save us from the imminent arrival of Terminator/Skynet, giving us time to ponder how to do these things right, as physicist Max Tegmark proposes in his article, Humanity in Jeopardy on the Kurzweil site -- as well as his book, Our Mathematical Universe.

Where are we headed? These tradeoffs are discussed by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their new book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

And, of course, well… I explore them pretty extensively, too. See my earlier posting: Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

== Why Glass is so limited? ==

What are the design tradeoffs in delivering actual immersive augmented reality glasses, of the sort I called "tru-vu goggles" in EARTH (1989)? Google Glass finesses the problem with a very narrow angle of view, offset from straight-ahead.  In this article you can see some of the problems… and how a new company has come up with clever ways to solve them.

At Google last week, I described to Head of Research Peter Norvig the reasons why I thought Google was keeping Glass simple, and not covering the user's visual field, or offering face recog features.  He said yep. The company with big pockets cannot afford to be the first to offer full Augmented Reality.  Not when the first ten years will be (as I describe in fiction) filled with accidents and lawsuits.

== What I learned while visiting tomorrow ==

All right then…  David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford -- as well as the author of The Beginning of Infinity -- came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the Grandfather paradox*.  He solved the paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner.

“Meaning that, if you kill your grandfather, you do it with only probability one-half,” said PRL co-author Mark Wilde, an LSU assistant professor. “Then, he’s dead with probability one-half, and you are not born with probability one-half, but the opposite is a fair chance. You could have existed with probability one-half to go back and kill your grandfather.”

The original article cited here maintains that, to be consistent with Deutsch’s model, which holds that you can only change the past as long as you can do it in a self-consistent manner, Wilde and colleagues had to come up with a solution that would allow for a looping curve back in time, and copying of quantum data based on a time traveling particle, without disturbing the past.

“That was the major breakthrough, to figure out what could happen at the beginning of this time loop to enable us to effectively read out many copies of the data without disturbing the past,” Wilde said. “It just worked.”

“If an adversary, if a malicious person, were to have access to these time loops, then they could break the security of quantum key distribution,” Wilde said. “That’s one way of interpreting it. But it’s a very strong practical implication because the big push of quantum communication is this secure way of communicating. We believe that this is the strongest form of encryption that is out there because it’s based on physical principles.”Such encryption is believed to be unbreakable — that is, as long as hackers don’t have access to Wilde’s looping closed timelike curves.

=== So?  Are we being visited from the future? ===

In a recent paper, Robert J. Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson, suggest that we actually search for time travelers… via Internet searches, by seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. Their first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine.  Whereupon, lo and behold… "no time travelers were discovered." Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

Well, well, didn't the authors kind of assume that the time travelers either want to be found or else that - when back home in the future - they failed to do a web search for traps like the one laid by Nemiroff and Wilson?

It reminds me of the "Invitation to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences" that was issued on the internet by the late professor Allan Tough, who felt certain that mechanical envoy-lurkers -- waiting in the asteroid belt for millions of years -- had already inveigled their way into our networks to read our web pages. (And much more? Are there NSAliens out there?)  Further that they were only awaiting an invitation to speak up and announce themselves.  Allan was brave enough to invite me to post my own variant (deviant?) invitation… or else decryption of why lurkers might refrain and just keep lurking.

All the same logics apply to time travelers, I'm afraid.  Oh, that invitation of mine to lurkers?  It became a number of chapters in Existence!

For an exploration of time travel scenarios in science fiction, see an extensive list of Time Travel in Fiction, or the more recent anthology The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF, with short stories by Silverberg, Rusch, Levinson, Swanwick, Priest and others.

== And finally ==

Two newly discovered species of spider -- in far-apart Peru and the Philippines -- make decoy spiders to place on their webs, each one about the size of a half-dollar, constructed from debris and food carcasses, with eight legs radiating from its bulky center. The tiny sculptor dwells inside her creation.

Batteries will be vital in the new world of dispersed and sustainable power systems. The prospect of low-cost storage has long been a nirvana for the renewable energy industry with the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy restraining their competitiveness against fossil fuels such as coal.  Now researchers have found ways to use cheap/abundant materials in Flow Batteries.

Coolest commercial mini-drone I've seen so far.

Abbot & Costello hilariously do math