Sunday, December 21, 2014

Study Notes: Dec 14-20, 2014: "The Evolution of Names and Personal Identifiers"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Homework for next week: 

"The Evolution of Names and Personal Identifiers"
  • "In 1600, it just wasn't important for a farmer in northern Sweden to have a consistent spelling of his name, or even to have a consistent name. It's likely that his [Hellman's ancestor] name was written down only a dozen or so times in his lifetime-- in church baptismal records, maybe a marriage record. If he had been a city dweller, it would have been different, but or the most part the writing down of names was part of a[n] effort by the church and thus the government to extend its dominion into the countryside."
  • "It was common for people to be identified only by their first name and the name of their village. Patronymics were the cultural norm in the cities." 
  • "In the late 1800s, it became popular in Sweden to adopt family names instead of patronymics. Probably this has to do with an increase of awareness of naming conventions in the rest of the world." 
  • "Personal names are now used globally-- my name has to compete with that of other Eric Hellmans around the world when somebody wants to search for information about us on Google... So the global village reduces us to the same attribute-based disambiguation schemes that were used in 1600-- I am now Eric Hellman of Montclair, New Jersey, or Eric Hellman the Linking Technologist." 
  • "When I was a scientist, writing articles for technical journals, I always used the form 'E.S. Hellman' for my name, because I had searched Science Citation Index and knew that no one else had published under that name for at least 10 years." 
  • "When I designed a database-driven e-journal with front-to-back automation in the early days of the internet (1995), I had the bright idea of giving identifiers to all the entities involved in publishing a paper. I had imagined a world in which the authors of every paper and the institutions they worked for would have global identifiers, and the article would be rendered used the up-to-the minute information from the database... I briefly considered the possibility that an author would change their name, and I naively decided that papers were authored by people and not by author names. If an author changed their name in real life, the name on the paper should change as well."
  • "Naming of individuals is a universal practice across all human societies, and name shifting is almost as universal, and certainly as human. The regularization of names on the other hand, the conversion of names into identifiers, has always been a governmental activity... If we give people global identifiers, what will they do with them? Will they view them as progress for civilization, like roads and communication systems, or will they view them as encroachments on privacy and liberty and on their rights to change their name and identity?"

"At One with Nature"
  • Most of this is in Swedish, so, um... Yeah. 
  • "Since time immemorial, nature has been conceived of as a female entity. This ancient concept is also a recurring element in contemporary Swedish horror fiction."
  • Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment: "Here, 'nature' names the non-human world, the non-artificial, considered as an object of human contemplation, exploitation, wonder or terror. In this sense culture and nature are opposed. Being other than or superior to nature in this sense forms a definitive part of many modern conceptions of human identity, and of the enlightenment project of the 'conquest of nature'. At the same time, non-human 'nature' also acquires connotations of the untouched, the pure, the sacral."
  • Clark: "Throughout history, places such as deserts or forests have been conceived of as sites of identity crisis and metamorphosis, as the domains of the monstrous and the terrifying, places of religious insight or of rites of passage, as in the biblical 'wilderness.' Such a space of disorientation may attract any number of meanings, hopes, or anxieties."

"Five Bold Predictions for the Future of Humanity"
  • "Strangely enough, I believe it's easier to predict the distant future than it is the near future; while the path to a destination may be filled with surprises, the destination itself can sometimes be much clearer. Warren Buffet may not be able to guarantee the stock market is higher in three years, but he's likely very certain about that fact in fifteen." 
  • "Future generations of humans will continue on a path of confluence with an ever-increasing number of us becoming of mixed ethnicity. Yale research published last year corroborated this line of thinking and described the end result of this phenomenon as 'we will all look Brazilian'. It cited Brazil as arguably the world's most diverse melting pot with representation from native Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and others." 
  • "Human civilizations reach sociopolitical 'stability' by dividing themselves into two polar alignments around two labels... With our need to 'belong', we are eager to take on one of the two labels... It's for that reason that I believe that Earth will not unify completely but will instead be polarized between two 'super nations' each with roughly half of the population of Earth. Each of the 'super nations' will have a brand that gives its population a common identity and unifies them against the other." It would be interesting to chart this out, especially if non-violent conflict could be worked out. 

"Twenty Top Predictions for Life 100 Years From Now"
  • "Algae farming is also on the way for renewable energy, and maybe even for growth of feedstock (raw materials) or resource extraction via GM seaweed or algae." 
  • "Saltwater algae that's been genetically modified to absorb more nitrogen fom the air than conventional algae could free up to 68% of the fresh water that is now tied up in conventional agriculture." 
  • "Transmission [from brain to brain] will be just as easy as other forms of brain augmentation. Picking up thoughts and relaying them to another brain will not be much harder than storing them on the net." 
  • "There is already some weather control technology for mediating tornadoes, making it rain and so on, and thanks to climate change concerns, a huge amount of knowledge is being gleaned on how weather works. It won't necessarily be cheap enough to use routinely and is more likely to be used to avoid severe damage in key areas." Called geoengineering. 
  • "Before there is a rush to develop Antarctica we will most likely see a full-scale rush to develop the Arctic. Whether the Arctic states tighten control over the region's resources, or find equitable and sustainable ways to share them will be a major political challenge in the decades ahead. Successful (if not necessarily sustainable) development of th Arctic portends well for the development of Antarctica." 
  • "It is likely quite that there will only be a few regional currencies by the middle of the century and worldwide acceptance of a global electronic currency." 
  • "The internet is is enabling new forms of bartering and value exchange. Local currencies are also now used by several hundred communities across the US and Europe. In other words, look for many more types of currency and exchange not fewer, in the coming decades." 
  • "There are some indications already that California wants to split off and such pressures tend to build over time. it is hard to see this waiting until the end of the century. Maybe an East Coast cluster will want to break off too. Pressures come from the enormous differences in wealth generation capability, and people not wanting to fund others if they can avoid it." 
  • "Desert greening is progressing so this [that the deserts will become tropical forests] s just about possible." 
  • "I think we will certainly see some weaker forms of marriage that are designed to last a decade or two rather than a whole lifetime, but traditional marriage will still be an option." 
  • "The trend is in the direction of more sovereign nations rather than fewer. In the coming years, corporations or wealthy private citizens will attempt to use earth-moving technologies to build their own semi-sovereign entities in international waters." 

"Is Vat-Grown Meat Kosher?"
  • "What happens when there's no animal to slaughter? Vat meat can't have hooves, and certainly doesn't ruminate. Does that mean that no cultured meat is kosher? Or that all of it is? Or does it stick to its parent species?"
  • "[Rabbi Arnold] Bienstock thinks the Conservatives will be hesitant to adopt artificially raised meat, unless it's seen as something completely different to its original form. The Rabbi compared this to two previous cases with kosher food: cheese and gelatin. Both contain animal products which may not be kosher, so specific variations have to be made for people who are strictly Orthodox. On the other hand, the Conservative movement viewed these objects as being so far changed and removed from their original source, that they don't need to be kosher. Says Bienstock, 'these elements are re-defined as not really being meat, as the substance is so incredibly transformed. So using [this technology] the Conservative movement might say it's not really meat because it doesn't come from an animal.'"

"The Next Big Disruption"
  • Clay Shirky: "First, the people running the old system don't notice the change. When they do, they assume it's minor. That it's a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt." 
  • "From the way they [Generation Z] think in 4D and prefer to communicate with images, to being tech innates that operate on five screens at a given time. Generation Z have been raised in larger, extended households as retired grandparents have moved in and older, Millennial siblings have moved back home. As a result, they are sharers and have greater affinity and respect for the elderly." 
  • "The driverless car is not a pipe dream. Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) vehicles are already operating in London, South Korea, and West Virginia... Cars could potentially be bundled with houses and workplaces,becoming home offices, entertainment centers and learning environments. Time spent on the road could be spent in other ways, thus giving Americans back over four years of life that they would otherwise have spent behind the wheel. Autonomous cars will enable new consumer behaviors like 'Reverse Urbanization' and increased car sharing, and will spawn new uses for the extra space like entertainment on the go and vehicles being used for elicit behavior. Car windows and surfaces could become touch screens, allowing cars to play a key role in entertainment and education. Car interiors will come to look like homes, with their own unique decor and feel." 
  • "Drone companions and personalized drones will rise in popularity over the next decade. Autonomous robotic devices will be the perfect companion and help facilitate commerce across the crowd economy. Commercial drones are already part of conversation; they will participate in home deliveries, assisting manual labor, and even a capacity as tour guides. And personalized drones will attend to all these needs and more. Photographers and cinematographers have already begun using drones to seek out shots and footage that would be impossible for a human to access otherwise." 

"11 Predictions on the future of social media"
  • Cory Bergman: "When news breaks in the future, it will be covered by a multitude of eyewitnesses streaming live video. These streams will knit together into a single immersive video, enabling the viewer to virtually experience the event in real time." 
  • Piera Gelardi: "Mobile is the first step toward the portable future of social media and how we consume it, and I think wearables will be a big part of that. I can see it evolving into an implanted device in our bodies that will connect to everything around us... I think you'll be able to share a taste, a sensation and a smell... Imagine shopping an e-commerce store with a friend, virtually trying things on your avatar that's representative of your likeness and conversing in real time with that friend, all while on the go in different places." 
  • Sarah Green: "In the future the Internet will operate more like electricity does today, as an unseen part of the infrastructure around us that we notice only when it's not present." 
  • Otis Kimzey: "With this much data, personalized content will become the norm." 
  • Matthew Knell: "The term social media will fade out and become a mass media form in 25 years. By then, there will be three major trends. First, there will be more personal ownership of data. Second, individuals will be able to manage data across platforms in a more centralized way. Third, there will be extremely speedy mobile wireless broadband built into even the most affordable devices to allow one-touch and instant playback of any piece of content." 
  • Jason Stein: "You can't make it to the beach in Italy on Tuesday night after a hard day of work, but you can achieve a very similar emotional effect of being there via Oculus glasses while on your terrace with a glass of wine."

"The Transhumanist Bodhisattvas"
  • "The Transhumanist Bodhisattvas are a group of transhumanists who seek to obtain the goals of transhumanism for the benefit of other sentient beings. Rather than solely for themselves, the Transhumanist Bodhisattvas work to benefit everyone and establish a world of universal and beneficial abundance."
  • "The Bodhisattvas base their approach on the notion of bodhicitta or non-dual compassion and recognize that the universe consists of a series of complex interconnected networks that depend on each other in deep ways. Our illusion of separateness divides us, but it remains an illusion. We are connected." 
  • "In Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism the aspirant's goal of practice is to be reborn an infinite number of times so that the aspirant can work to liberate other beings still trapped in samsara... The Transhumanist Bodhisattvas plan to live a long time so they can help others do the same. They plan to return until they get it right." How is this "coming back" intended to be carried out? Or are these true-blue Buddhists and not people grabbing some nice terminology? 
  • "The Bodhisattvas take the wandering monk Hotei as their patron and symbol. Hotei is also a symbol of the universal benign abundance we seek to achieve through transhumanist technologies for the benefit of all beings." 
  • "The Transhumanist Bodhisattvas can be found around the fringes of the effective altruium movement, and they are as likely to be found reading Dogen as Kurzweil."
  • "Myriad sentient beings remain trapped in samara, suffering, destined to die from aging and disease." 
  • Zenji Dogen: "If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?"
  • Zenji Dogen: "Enlightenment is intimacy with all things." 

"Turn Your Inkjet Printer into a Chemistry Lab"
  • "If you stop and think about it for a moment, you will realize what an astonishing feat of precision your color inkjet printer is. It can take the primary colors-- cyan, yellow, magenta and black-- and mix them together carefully enough to achieve more than a million different hues and shades. Not only that but the drops of colour are mere nanolitres (billionths of a litre) in volume, each of which is then placed on the paper... with better than pinpoint accuracy." 
  • "Every chemical process that goes on in living organisms is controlled by a cascade of reactions. The steps in a cascade are mediated by protein molecules called enzymes. Each enzyme makes a small chemical alteration, like workers on a production line, to a molecule before passing its product onto the next enzyme." 
  • "The problem is that to understand these complicated processes by reconstructing them outside of a living cell is difficult. The concentrations of an enzyme relative to the next in the line is key. Get this wrong and bottle necks are formed in the production line, as one enzyme works faster than the next." 
  • "To figure out what are the right conditions to replicate a living cell's workings chemists must set up and monitor a vast number of reactions. Screening large numbers of reactions like this is often done using '96-well plates', which are 96 tiny containers with a unique combination of chemicals in each. These reactions might be set up manually or, if the lab is well-funded, by an expensive robot. But even with the best robots available it can still be a slow process." 
  • "Yifel and colleagues have already shown that by loading the printer cartridges with the right enyzmes they can use the set up to indicate the presence of glucose in a sample. Glucose in urine is a[n] indication of diabetes, so their printer-based chemistry already has the potential to diagnose diabetes. The result then could be a futrue where a trip to the doctors results in a printout of, quite literally, your urine and some enzymes alongside, after 30 seconds or so, a diagnosis and the prescription." 

"Pan's Labyrinth"
  • All quotes by Del Toro unless otherwise noted. 
  • Guillen: "Pan's Labyrinth is textured with redemptive transgression. Can you speak to why doing the wrong thing ends up being so right?" 
  • "Instinct will guide you more than intellect toward what's right for you and actually more naturally right. Disobedience is one of the strongest signals of your conscience of what is right and what is wrong. When you disobey in an intelligent way, you disobey in a natural way, it turns out to be more beneficial than blind obedience. Blind obedience castrates, negates, hides, and destroys what makes us human. On the other hand, instinct and disobedience will always point you in a direction that should be natural, should be organic to the world. So I think that disobedience is a virtue and blind obedience is a sin." This seems to get into the is-ought problem. Why are we defining the Natural as being synonymous with the Good? Death is natural. Is that good? Mind-breaking trauma is often natural. Is that good?
  • "One of the dangers of fascism and one of the dangers of true evil in our world-- which I believe exists-- is that it's very attractive. That it is incredibly attractive in a way that most people negate. Most people make their villains ugly and nasty and I think, no, fascism has a whole concept of design, and a whole concept of uniforms and set designs that made it attractive to the weak-willed." 
  • "I tried to make Sergi Lopez like all politicians that are truly evil-- well-dressed, well-groomed, well-spoken, gets up from his chair when a lady enters the room, gets up from his chair when a lady leaves the room... It's very rarely that when somebody is that worried about the outward experience, there's something truly truly wrong within."
  • "Extremes are incredibly powerful in cinema and the fact that this 11-year-old girl is much more comfortable in her skin than this fascist that hates himself so much that he slits his own throat in the mirror and negates his father's watch and does these crazy things, that gives the girl power and gives the other guy the illusion of power and the choice of cruelty." 
  • Hundertwasser: "The straight line is godless." 
  • "The straight lines are an obsession with perfection and perfection is unattainable. Perfection is a conceit. Perfection actually lies in fully loving the defect." 
  • The Marquis de Sade: "I understand murder for passion. I not only understand it, but I condone it. What I don't understand is murder for an idea. Or for a law. That is perverse." 
  • "When we send somebody to the electric chair because he killed one person but we give a purple heart to somebody because he killed dozens for the 'right' idea-- patriotism, liberty, democracy, whatever the fuck you want to invent-- I find it completely perverse." 
  • "I think that sexuality and religion come from your imprint in an early age. Whatever arouses your spirit or arouses your body at an early age, that's what is going to arouse it the rest of your life. Everything will be subordinate to that. It's a personal choice and it's a personal experience." 
  • Guillen: "When I was a student of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, he taught me that it was-- in some ways-- inappropriate the way kids in the '60s went gaga over Eastern mysticism. They could learn from it. They could enjoy it. But it wasn't really their path no matter how much they wanted it to be and they would always deep down at heart be Christians needing to resolve spiritual issues in a Christian way. Their template-- or as you say imprint-- had been set." 
  • "They will always be a Western man looking at the East. Where your feet stand does not limit your gaze but it does limit what perspective you judge it from. I can read all the fucking books about Taoism I want; I'll still be a Catholic boy reading them. There's no way of avoiding that." 
  • "It's so tragic for me that Mercedes cries for [Ofelia] at the end because for Mercedes the girl died but we know she didn't. That is very Catholic. [previous brackets original]"
  • "If you die and your legacy is one little flower blooming in a dry tree, that's enough of a legacy for me. And that's a magical legacy. If she had not done the things she did, the tree would have never bloomed, but, because she did them, there is a little flower blooming. On the other hand, she dies at peace. She dies at peace with what she did. She's the only character in the film who decides not to enact any violence. Not to take any lives. Even the doctor takes a life. But the only one who chooses 'I will not take any life because I own only mine', that's the character that survives spiritually. The fascist dies the loneliest death you could ever experience." 
  • Kierkegaard: "The tyrant's rule ends with his death. The martyr's rule begins with it." 
  • "My last image in the movie is an objective little white flower blooming in a dead tree with the bug watching it. So..." What Del Toro is getting at is that there is a hint that yes, all this has some objective element to it, because the girl did something to bring the tree back and that is an objective truth. 
  • "Now objectively, the way I structured it, there are three clues in the movie that tell you where I stand. I stand in that it's real. The most important clues are the flower at the end, and the fact that there's no way other than the chalk door to get from the attic to the Captain's office... Thie third clue is she's running away from her stepfather, she reaches a dead end, by the time he shows up she's not there. Because the walls open for her." 
  • Del Toro, as quoted from another interview: "There is a moment in everyone's life when they have the chance to be immortal, not literally, but like at the moment they don't give a fuck about death-- then they're immortal." I take issue with this conception of immortality. It may be interesting or admirable or foolish, but one thing that it is not, is immortality. 
  • "There comes a point [in a hostage situation] in which you realize that you are made prisoner along with him. You are also a hostage of the hostage situation. There is a moment in which you have to will yourself to be free because you are. You say, 'If it is true that he is a prisoner, it is also true I am not.' There's a moment where you start functioning again. You have to will it." 
  • "The moment it ceases to be important-- your death, not other people's death... It's part of the laundry list. So at that moment you become somewhat immortal, which means you're immune to death. That is in Pan's Labyrinth actually. If people watch it carefully, the precise wording of the faun's words to the girl is: 'You have to pass three tests before the full moon shines in the sky. We have to make sure that your spirit is intact and not become mortal.'" 
  • "She can flunk the tests. The mechanics of the tests she succeeds in. She believes in herself. She does what she thinks is right. She fucks up here and there but-- when the real test come[s], when she is cornered with no other options but to either kill or give her own life-- she chooses to put her own life at risk rather than the kid's. That's a real test. That's what makers her immortal."
  • "The Faun is the Pale Man in another guise. He's the trickster in another guise. So is the Faun. And the proof of that in the movie is that in the end when she goes and rejoins her father and her mother and the baby in the other world, the fairies that the Pale Man ate are all around her. The same fairies. I coded them in three colors-- green, blue and red-- so when they reappear you could know, 'Oh, those are the green, blue and red fairies.'" 

"Will Rituals Return?"
  • Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains: "Only around the nineteenth century, when mansions were built with separate entrance corridors, instead of one room connecting to the next and back stairways for servants, did the fully private peerless introvert become common." 
  • Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains: "The daily and annual rounds of activity in premodern societies were permeated with rituals that we would easily recognize as such by their formality; living in a patrimonial household in a medieval community (not to mention living in a tribal society) would have been something like what our lives would be if Christmas or Thanksgiving happened several times a month, along with many lesser ceremonies that punctuated every day." 
  • "Increasing wealth has given us more spatial privacy." 
  • "If we find ways (as with ems) to increase the population faster than we can increase wealth, wealth per person will fall. And if wealth falls, we may well see a revival of overt ritual." 
  • "I can't think of a historical novel that makes clear not only how common was ritual and conformity in farmer or forager societies, but how well that comforted and satisfied people. Nor can I think of science fiction stories portraying a future full of beloved ritual. Or any stories that show how lonely and disconnected we modern folks often feel because we lack the rituals that gave deep meaning to so many modern humans before us."

"Today's Apps Are Turning Us Into Sociopaths"
  • "While I am far from a Luddite who fetishizes a life without tech, we need to consider the consequences of this latest batch of apps and tools that remind us to contact significant others, boost our willpower, provide us with moral guidance, and encourage us to be civil. Taken together, we're observing the emergence of tech that doesn't just augment our intellect and lives-- but is now beginning to automate and outsource our humanity." 
  • "Ultimately, the reason technologies like BroApp are problematic is that they're deceptive. They take situations where people make commitments to be honest and sincere, but treat those underlying moral values as irrelevant-- or worse, as obstacles to be overcome." 

"Anti-aging Oxymorons and Anti-oxy-morons"
  • This is some interesting stuff. I'd like some more citations and would prefer to do some more research on the topic before I take it as gospel truth, but it's interesting. 
  • "Toxins in small quantities stimulate the body's longevity pathways, and anti-oxidants can nullify the very real anti-aging benefits of exercise." 
  • "In a definitive study, 29,000 Finnish men were given anti-oxidant vitamins in the 1990s, until the experiment was called off for ethical reasons. it turned out people taking the vitamins were dying at a higher rate than the placebo group."
  • "Aging is not about the body wearing out, and it's not about accumulating toxins. Aging is something our bodies are doing to themselves. All the stuff that goes wrong as we get older is no accident, and it's not a failure of the body. Aging is suicide on a schedule, programmed into our genes." 
  • "The stem cells in our body are tasked with renewing our skin and muscle and bones and blood, and even our nerve cells regrow over time... Telomeres are the body's primary aging clock; when the counter gets too high, the stem cells get the message to slow down growth and repair, to let the body go to pot."
  • "Our immune system is brilliant at distinguishing invaders from self, attacking the former and protecting the latter. This is done by the T-cells in our blood. The T in T-cell stands for 'thymus', a little organ behind the breast bone where T-cells are trained to tell the good guys from the bad guys. But your thymus has been shrinking ever since you were about 10 years old... 90-year-olds have almost no thymus left, and that has everything to do [with] why 90-year-olds can't defend against the flu, and why pneumonia is the Old Man's Friend." 
  • "The T-cells don't just fail to defend us against enemies, they make the opposite mistake as well, and attack perfectly good, healthy tissue. Inflammation is your first line of defense against invading microbes when you're injured, and it works great when we're young. But as we get old, inflammation turns inward... Inflammation has been linked to the Big Four diseases of old age which, together, are responsible for more than 90% of all deaths: cancer, heart attacks, Alzheimer's dementia, and stroke." 
  • "The Free Radical Theory [of Aging] is more than fifty years old... If damage from oxidation was the problem, then anti-oxidants should be the solution. It was a plausible theory when it first came out, but we've known for twenty years now that anti-oxidants don't work... It turns out that the damage caused by free radicals is completely avoidable, and it occurs when the body dials down its own native anti-oxidant system." 
  • "Every time you exercise, you generate copious free radicals, and they signal the body to repair damage, and rebuild muscle and bone better-than-new. Free radicals also signal the body to keep insulin sensitivity high, steering away from diabetes. When we take anti-oxidants, we interfere with this system, and that's why anti-oxidants do more harm than good." 
  • "Dogs exposed to tiny doses of chloroform live longer than dogs that are fed a pure, toxin-free diet." The author mentions homeopathy in a good way in this paragraph too, which sets off alarms in my head. 
  • "Raw foods are a good idea precisely because they are difficult to digest. Raw foods are absorbed slowly and incompletely. For those of us who enjoy eating or who are addicted to food, raw foods may allow us to eat to satiety, because more of the food goes through us, and less is absorbed. Raw foods are also less prone to cause a spike in blood sugar, triggering insulin release. Just try getting fat on a raw food diet, and you'll see what I mean." 
  • "Less starch and more raw foods are the best things about the Paleo Diet. The theory behind the Paleo Diet is something else again. It's based on the idea that our body is evolved to work with the foods that were available while we were evolving, which was, for the most part, before agriculture, in hunter-gatherer societies. You might be suspicious from the get-go when you realize that life expectancy in hunter-gatherer societies is under 40 years, even when the high rates of infant mortality are factored out. If the paleo diet worked so well, we would expect to find some extraordinarily old people among native peoples in parts of South America and Borneo where they still live the lives of our ancestors 20,000 years ago." 
  • "The good news is that researchers are beginning to realize that aging is an inside job. There are hormones and biochemical signals that tell the body to self-destruct. Jamming a chemical signal is something that pharmaceutical companies know well how to do, and it's much, much easier than repairing a body full of random damage." 

"Robotics Update"
  • "How can quantum physics help in the design of neural agents? Quantum computing is not limited to the '0' and '1' choices of control-gate technology which is the programming logic behind the computer on which I am writing this posting. Instead quantum states can be both '0' and '1' or somewhere in between. It is this fuzziness that makes quantum-computing technology the ideal brain for robotic learning, achieving new knowledge from what is observed and tried."
  • "The authors call their artificial intelligence model projective simulation (PS). PS uses episodic and compositional memory (ECM) to simulate future actions before real ones are taken." 
  • "A new start-up company, Brain Corporation, in San Diego, California, is taking that model and applying [it] to teaching robots rather than programming them in the conventional way by writing tons of code... A human could then teach a robot to perform one or more tasks through repeated demonstrations with the robot following along. After a few repetitions the robot can then perform the tasks on its own. Brain Corporation isn't out to build the kind of artificial intelligence capable of projective simulation and compositional memory. Instead its robots would be low-cost and capable of doing repetitive work." 
  • "The ISO wants to come up with a safety standard within the next year in anticipation of more Baxter-like robots joining workforces around the world. The kinds of standards being considered include what is the maximum amount of force allowed when [sic?] a robot exerts when working beside a human. As one participant stated, 'a bruise a day' would be an unacceptable standard for a human to receive from a robot partner." 

"Is It Better Never To Have Been Born?"
  • "Benatar views people's claims about the benefits of life skeptically, just as he would the ruminations of the slave who claims to prefer slavery to death." 
  • "I find this [Benatar's argument] one of the deepest, most troubling, and hardest to evaluate pieces I've ever read." Not I! But then, my value system is not hedonistic, and a certain amount of harm and suffering is not only permissible but desirable. 
  • "A possible answer might be to accept the truth of Benatar's assertions regarding the history of cosmic evolution to the present-- so far pain and unhappiness have outweighed their opposites and so far it would have been better next to have been-- but suggest that a glorious future is in store for our descendants. This future will make the long, painful struggle of life and consciousness ultimately worth it. Thus the end state will be so rewarding that we can say, in retrospect, that it was better to have been. Still this kind of eschatological talk scares me, inasmuch as it relies on a future that may not transpire. It also implies that somehow the future will justify past suffering. If this justification depends upon an eternal plan, then the eternal planner is exceptionally evil. As Dostoevsky said, the torture of a single child cannot be justified by a good future." 
  • Thoreau: "I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

"Lithium for Life Extension?"
  • "Lithium is not a drug, but a chemical element. It is right above sodium in the periodic table, and the theory is that the body can't tell the to apart. Sodium is an essential electrolyte, and the body uses it everywhere. Nerve signals are propagated as waves of substitution of sodium for potassium. The theory is that trace amounts of lithium in the body replace sodium, and move a little faster across membranes, because the ions are smaller and lighter." 
  • "There is general agreement that animal grazers don't concentrate lithium, and the best dietary sources are plants. Which plants are best? The answer seems to depend on lithium in the soil at the site where the plants happen to be grown." 
  • "A blood test might be helpful [to determine how much lithium you're getting], with the qualification that lithium passes quickly through the body (swept through with sodium), so the test is sensitive to what you happen to have eaten in the last 24 hours." 
  • "If 'energy is the currency of the body,' then phosphate groups are the dollar bills. Kinases are enzymes that activate other chemicals by attaching a phosphate group to them. The GSK-3s are kinase amplifiers. They specialize in finding places where there is already a single phosphate, then adding more to fully activate the substrate." 
  • "Trace doses of lithium might prove to be useful for modestly extending life and protecting against Alzheimer's... It should not be difficult to find some part of the world where people don't tend to move very often and then correlate local concentrations of lithium in drinking water with local variations in age at death." 
  • "If you want to experiment with lithium, I think that doses up to 1mg/day are safe." You think? "Just for context, this is a tiny quantity. One ounce of lithium is a lifetime supply. Larger doses are not better. They are toxic... Lithium carbonate is available as a prescription drug, in pills that cannot easily be divided into 100 doses. If you felt comfortable with the procedure, I suppose you could dissolve a 500mg pill in a pint of water and take it by the teaspoon." These directions are so incredibly reassuring. 

"Designer Viruses Could be the New Antibiotics"
  • "In bacteria, an important component of the immune system is composed of a family of proteins, which is tas[k]ed specifically with breaking down foreign DNA. Each bug produces a set of these proteins that chew the genetic material of viruses and other micro-organism[s] into pieces while leaving its own genome intact. In vertebrates, a more advanced mechanism-- called the adaptive immune system-- creates a molecular memory of previous attacks and prepares the organism for the next wave of infection." 
  • "In 2007 a group of scientists from the dairy industry showed that bacteria commonly used for the production of cheese and yogurts could be 'vaccinated' by exposure to a virus... It quickly became clear that bacteria were introducing viral DNA fragments into their own genome to protect themselves from later attacks." 
  • "In 2012 a German team identified all the pieces and showed exactly how bacteria transcribe viral DNA into a short RNA... which guides the DNA-cutting protein called Cas9 and tells it where to chop off viral DNA... Within two years, many laboratories demonstrated that, by tailoring the short RNA guide, any gene could be cut out from a chromosome using the CRISPR-Cas9 system... A procedure that used to take months using previous technologies-- such as breeding or genome editing-- can now be done in a few weeks." 
  • "A prototype technology that turns a bacteria's defence mechanism into a self-destructing weapon. The main idea behind their work was to use genetic engineering to rewire the bacteria's immunity to produce [a] 'boomerang' antibiotic [that] targets only bugs carrying specific genes." 

"The Future of Lunar Archeology"
  • "With the advent of national and commercial interests in going back to the moon (such as mining) even with the best intentions those missions could irreparably harm the cultural remains left by the first humans to visit another celestial body." 
  • "By the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967, no one nation can own the surface of the moon, but the artifacts-- from a flag to scientific equipment-- remain the property and responsibility of those who put them there." 

"Aging Brains Aren't Necessarily Declining Brains"
  • "Using cognitive neuroscience methods to study aging has unexpectedly revealed that, contrary to previous thought, aging brains remain somewhat malleable and plastic." 
  • "By tracking what happens inside the brain during particular activities, neuroimaging data reveal patterns of change with age. For instance, older adults sometimes use a region in both the left and right hemispheres of their brains to perform certain tasks, while young adults engage the region in only one half of the brain. Older adults also appear to activate more anterior regions of the brain whereas young adults exhibit more posterior activation." 
  • "One exciting new direction for research on the aging brain uses neurostimulation to temporarily activate or suppress distinct neural regions." 

Miscellany
  • Charles Chaplin, Jr: "Their destinies were poles apart. One was to make millions weep, while the other was to set the whole world laughing. Dad could never think of Hitler without a shudder, half of horror, half of fascination. 'Just think,' he would say uneasily, 'he's the madman, I'm the comic. But it could have been the other way around.'"
  • John G. Messerly: "Only if we can choose whether to live or die are we really free. Our lives are not our own if they can be taken from us without or consent." 
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