Of course the big question is why governments are even using filters in the first place. Obviously in countries with authoritarian governments, it’s a means of control. In democratic countries, it’s usually a response to an amorphous threat like terrorism or child pornography. Both types of nations use the same basic approach, a campaign of indexing as many sites as possible along with their IPs and URLs, programmatically creating a custom-tailored blacklist, then setting critical routers to reject traffic to and from these blacklisted sites. Since telecommunication companies generally control these networks, they’re the ones to carry this out. One rather basic strategy for what they do to even begin such an enormous task is to create a web crawler, a simple and efficient program that reads the html loaded from URLs and parses it for keywords, key phrases, or anything specific requested by its writers. Drop this crawler into a site like DMOZ, then follow the thousands of links in every category you want as a starting point, branching off until the trail of hyperlinks brings you full circle or you run out of links to scan. In a matter of days, you could easily have an index covering several million sites.

Whenever the crawler finds objectionable keywords, it will add the URL and IP to your blacklist which will then be used by a routers to block any requests to it. As the crawlers will keep crawling or re-crawling, updating the blacklist, the routers will keep blocking and unblocking the traffic. So where do humans join the process? As administrators and debuggers when something goes awry. There’s just too much data for a human to parse otherwise, and the team supervising the implementation of the blacklist may never know what sites it actually shut down and why unless they’re explicitly pointed to a particular case and their crawlers left thorough logs of why they made the decisions they did. The whole thing is as close as you can get to arbitrary without fitting an appropriate definition because it works by simply finding if the HTML of the site contains the wrong word more than a few times or not. You could conduct a contextual analysis but that’s no guarantee of accurate decision- making on the crawler’s part because computers are not great at following human context, and while we have machines that can be configured to summon the computing grunt to work with natural language, it’s unlikely a lot of communication companies are going to invest the cash needed to run a sophisticated analysis of what particular websites actually say. It’s cheaper for them to block, then unblock after a complaint or two.

But again, why are governments that generally allow free speech, free expression, freedom of religion, and do nothing about their citizens accessing adult entertainment sites, in the web censorship business? My opinion is that this can be chalked up to a glaring ignorance of how the web works and politicians’ need to be seen in action when his or her constituents complain. Riots and looting haphazardly coordinated via social media? A child porn sharing ring hiding in some dark recess of the web? Minors regularly viewing porn -tube sites that’ll just take their word for it that they’re 18? Block it! After all, that’s how it worked in the old days, right? You saw a questionable or objectionable bit of content on TV or in a newspaper, or tucked away on bookstore shelves, a complaint was written and the content was pulled. So obviously, we’ll just have someone block the content on the web because that’s how we’ve always dealt with objectionable material, right? Actually, no. It’s one thing to shut down a site peddling illegal wares or doing something both exploitative and criminal, but proactive scans of the web don’t work that way. There’s no good way to run a site off the web and it can always be moved to an unreachable server farm ran by a country where its pursuers have no jurisdiction, while trying to block sites by a crawlers’ keyword analysis only makes people upset that they can’t get to some of their favorite sites after a contributor used the wrong word or the wrong quote and got flagged by an automated system.

Really, I absolutely get it, much of our knowledge about the human mind and how it works it provisional and a best guess from data that’s still only scratching the surface of what there is to discover. Hell, we’re still talking about why we sleep and wondering whether it supports neural scaling, a fascinating phenomenon described in detail by the Neuroskeptic in his guest post for a major pop sci magazine, and one that seems to have an interesting implication or two for AI researchers out there focused on artificial neural networks. Having done a few research projects in the AI realm you really develop an appreciation for the sheer amount of things we do not understand yet see in front of our eyes every day. But at the same time, we do know a good deal and we’re making strides towards finding out much, much more. Interesting work is done every day to unlock the brain’s mysteries, work with very practical applications in medicine, life extension, and social sciences. To either just overlook fascinating or eye-catching ideas because they’re provisional, or drown them out by going on and on about replication and supporting and detracting literature, makes for an absolutely unreadable story for those who are just interested in getting an overall idea of how the mind seems to work. We’re not trying to train new neuroscientists with popular science books and blog posts, we’re just trying to educate the curious.

I know, I know, I can also be a really nitpicky buzz kill, especially when it comes to the Singularity crowd, but all my ridicule is directed at egregious and fundamental mistakes and misunderstandings rather than trying with all my might to turn a mass publication into a proper scientific dissertation. Have you ever read a dissertation or a thesis? They’re usually peppered with enough jargon, diagrams, figures, tables, and schematics to send the heads of anyone who is not a grad student or a post-doc in the field spinning since they’re not written for a popular tome but for trained experts in the subject area. It’s bizarre that Chabris is applying a graduate school standard to a popular work and obsessing over any minor point he finds in Lehrer’s book, demanding pages upon pages of exhaustive summaries of replication efforts. After all, do readers need to know how many other scientists conducted similar research and came up with similar results or about every disagreement over an extremely technical point or statistical significance of a particular observed effect between five teams? No, not at all. All they need to know is how the experiment was done, what the results were, what those results mean, and whether this is a departure from what we thought we knew before and if so by how much. That’s already a lot of information to process for a curious layperson. Drowning them in minutia simply annoys them.

Usually this is when some scientists cough, sputter, and say "what do you mean ‘minutia?’ I’ve spent much of my life studying all this ‘minutia’ and wrote paper after paper about it! Of course it’s important!" And it is. To the other experts who study related minutia and combine their work into a comprehensive picture of the field. Just to use what I know as an example, there are computer scientists who devote all their time to the ins and outs of parallel processing, studying the best and most efficient algorithms for allocating tasks, spawning threads, and synchronizing the results. For extremely complex tasks, I will read their work to figure out if I can get away with using a specialized parallel processing library or if I have to write extra code to tweak my threads to boost performance, or dynamically figure out when sequential execution is faster or if my system will really need to parallelize. You, as a user, don’t need to know or care about any of that. All you need to know is that we’re able to take multiple requests form you and do them side by side to get the information back to you faster so you’re aware that you can ask your IT team whether they could speed up a slow enterprise application that way. This process of keeping complex information irrelevant to you behind the scenes even has a computing principle named after it: encapsulation. This is basically what science writers do. They encapsulate the science. Want to learn more? You can always take a college class or two and see where that leads you…

When talking about rockets, it’s very important to keep in mind that there are different kinds or thrust we could produce and what would be extremely efficient in space would flop on Earth. To leave the planet, we need big, controlled explosions and while an antimatter additive would make for a much bigger boom and generate an incredible amount of thrust, a pure antimatter engine wouldn’t do much but irradiate everyone and everything around it. Instead, it would work more like an ion thruster, releasing tiny particles that slowly but surely push a spacecraft to incredible velocities rather than provide a quick, swift kick up to speed like liquid hydrogen does in conventional rocketry. So the basic idea is that antimatter in a Penning trap, would be fired at any matter we aren’t very fond of anymore, annihilate it producing the amount of energy predicted by Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence equation, and as that energy starts leaving the nozzle, it decays into tiny short lived particles that physicists call pi mesons, or pions for short. Blasting out a stream of pions at very high speed would be what gives antimatter powered spacecraft their relativistic velocities. The only problem is that while the annihilation in their engines’ cores is perfectly efficient, the nozzles are not, and previous studies came up with somewhat disappointing numbers, giving the engine a 36% efficiency rating at the very most. Not good news at all.

However, according to a new paper by a duo of physicists using the same software that CERN uses to figure out how particles are colliding in the LHC, these past models are outdated and with just a little tweaking here and there, antimatter engines could actually be 85% efficient, allowing a spacecraft to reach 0.7c which works out to a blistering 756,000,000 km/h. For comparison, the ISS orbits at 28,000 km/h and the fastest spaceship currently traveling through our solar system, New Horizons, tops out at 58,536 km/h. They also found that the magnetic fields needed to govern the matter-antimatter reactions would have a strength of 12 Tesla. Today, a magnet operating at 25 Tesla can be found at a university research lab, so the technology need to operate an extremely potent antimatter powered engine actually exists right now. The only problem is that we just lack the adequate amount of fuel to make it work. We’ve made millions of antimatter particles but the production is an extremely inefficient process and less than 1% of all the antimatter created is effectively trapped. There are natural processes that make antimatter and magnetic fields around planets do trap it, however this antimatter is very short lived and very rare. You’d need to get to the center of the galaxy to find enough of it to even think of powering a spaceship with it. But the paper’s authors are more optimistic, pointing out that no one has really tried to tackle the issue of antimatter production for industrial use, and that most fuel sources see their supply increased exponentially as we learn more about them and their uses, which drives the demand for them.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe we could explore trapping naturally occurring antimatter or exploiting a new means of creating billions of antiparticles at a time with lasers and millimeter thick gold leaf as part of an engine or a reactor, immediately channeling them into a reaction chamber rather than trying to trap them. Certainly all the energy required to make the antimatter would mean that it’s a highly inefficient fuel source on its own, but that hardly matters for rockets because we’re far more concerned with the reaction being efficient rather than trying to balance the energy equation, and when using tiny amounts of it as a powerful additive to more conventional fuels, its contribution could offset the costs of producing it. For example, if we could use antimatter to create a powerful pulsed nuclear laser capable of creating a tiny artificial black hole we would use as an engine for a spacecraft or a power source, we could get more antimatter as that tiny little black hole feeds and belches an occasional stream of antiparticles under the right conditions. Of course a scenario like that is not exactly a weekend project on the horizon, but it’s amazing what sorts of things you find out when you actually try to figure out how to accomplish something ambitious and complicated. In theory, we have some very interesting uses for antimatter as a fuel. Maybe we should try to make more of it to find out how it works in the real world…

See: Keane, Ronan and Zhang, Wei-Ming. (2012). Beamed Core Antimatter Propulsion: Engine Design and Optimization arXiv: 1205.2281v1

Taxpayers in America are used to spending money and getting something concrete in return. Very seldom will they spend cash just to have someone figure things out without necessarily delivering the solution, and when they do, they’re unlikely to do so again. So after investing a lot of money into a particular tool or line of research over many years, they expect a return on their investment in the form of a new gadget or a new drug. But while that may be a good attitude for investing in a company or shopping at the mall, it’s not a good idea to apply the same kind of expectations to what is inherently a process of repeated trial and error with few givens. Yet, that’s exactly the attitude we’re apparently supposed to do with complicated technical and scientific matters…

Neither candidate will ask, for instance, why taxpayers spend some $30 billion annually to try to understand the basic causes of diseases but virtually nothing on delivering effective new medical therapies to the ill. Or why the departments of defense and energy invest enormous resources in developing military technologies difficult, if not impossible, to translate for civilian applications.

Here’s the thing. As said before, science is hard. Really hard. Nature could not be bothered to give any less of a flying monkey’s tail rash about how much we spend trying to cure cancers. When a single tumor comes with six different strains of the disease, as was recently discovered, yeah, it’s going to take scientists a minute or two to figure out how to do the medical equivalent of simultaneously putting down six ninjas, each armed with a different weapon and approaching from a completely different angle, without killing a hundred bystanders in the process. People dream of robot butlers doing their chores for them and since people I know I worked with projects related to AI cognition, they ask me when we’ll have those all the time. Their ears quickly whither just as soon as they realize how much raw computing power it takes to crunch data from the environment and run through all the calculations to come up with a conclusion, and how far away we are from being able to design an algorithm that will let a robot make you breakfast in less than five hours and without being custom built for your specific kitchen. Yes, we are taking big leaps towards this, but affordable robot butlers might be decades away at best, and yes, there is a very real worry that they’ll steal thousands of jobs in the process.

Sure, you might get lucky and leave a dirty lab for a while, then come back and find out that you incubated filth so potent that it can be harnessed to effectively treat almost any bacterial infection in humans, creating a medical revolution that added decades to life expectancy. But more often than not, you’ll fail to develop a new, effective, safe medication some 999 times out of 1,000 after a decade or so of work. Likewise, technology we had to custom build for war won’t necessarily translate well to the civilian world because we don’t build guns and missiles anticipating that they’re going to be converted into sewage pipes or drills. Whenever you start to pile on too many uses for any particular tech stack, you’ll end up with a monstrosity that doesn’t perform any of its intended tasks well. Your computer can’t also be your microwave and shower. Of course we have internet communication protocols, miniaturized electronics, and new alloys and plastics making a leap from sword to ploughshare, but many very specialized systems simply can’t make this kind of jump. But hey, don’t listen to a geek like me because I’m part of the problem. You see, the geeks have this "peer review" policy that makes it hard for laypeople to participate in reviewing a scientist’s or engineer’s work. That’s just so elitist, isn’t it?

For much of the past 65 years, the scientists and engineers have essentially told the government, “Trust us.” Through the self-regulation of peer review, scientists and engineers essentially judge the value of their work, resisting attempts to permit ordinary citizens to express their preferences, either directly or through elected representatives. Despite some significant exceptions, such as research on certain diseases and in specific areas of national security, [the following] philosophy of government-funded research has prevailed: Government can decide on what level to fund S&T, but research priorities should be [under] the purview, chiefly if not exclusively, of the scientists and engineers themselves.

Come on folks, when I posted the preprint to a project on which I was working, how many of you took a look at it? About a thousand people looked at that post yet the silence was deafening. Don’t think I’m offended. The likelihood that I’m going to read a very specific medical paper by a doctor whose blog I read is also low since I do not have an adequate education in medicine to make an educated decision on the value of the work. And if you know that I’m not educated enough to review medical research, why in the world would you ever think that my opinions about it should drive funding policy for this line of study? Would you trust me to detect a problem with these papers or not get too carried away with a false positive? Yet, according to the logic above, because my taxes pay for this work, I should have the right to review it because the customer is always right and I’m the customer. This is plainly ridiculous and given that so many Americans simply tune out when a discussion is outside their area of person competence, we’d get science by wish list rather than actual scientific research that explores what’s possible and what’s out there. Science by mob rule is unsustainable. Just think of all the petitions from overzealous creationists demanding that evolutionary biology get cut off from the NSF. Imagine how many scientists would be punished for not getting a potential cancer cure right on their first try. In such an arrangement, small minorities of zealots and activists will easily outshout the majority of rational participants, creating a recipe for fiscal and scientific disasters. Want to fix science? Just let it progress in peace.

Kind of cruel, isn’t it? After all many of the colleges aggressively advertising to those who believe that a degree will vastly improve their lives are infamous for subsisting almost entirely on government grants, charging all if their students and arm and a leg to attend, widespread fraud on financial aid documents, and after having their students sit through courses accredited by agencies with no standards, they spit these students back out with unsustainable debt, and just as few job prospects as they had before. While what many for-profits do is usually legal, except that fraud on financial documents part, it’s unequivocally unethical and it’s made so much worse by the fact that after they’re done with a student, he can’t continue his education elsewhere or get a regionally accredited degree without having to start from scratch because his for-profit credits count towards squat at a properly accredited university. How is this legal? Well, aggressive lobbying is one reason, and how reverently we view any form of education as being a gateway to a career. Unfortunately, colleges are not magic and those who think that rushing to class will help them get a job should ask themselves who’ll pay their bills for the next three to four years and how they plan to pay off their loans if they won’t find a new job quickly…

One of the more recent summations of how comes from Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars’ scenario for a robot brothel that would substitute advanced versions of Real Dolls we have today for flesh and blood women, a scenario that could put a real dent in the amount of human trafficking, misery, and woe that’s inflicted on many sex workers shuttled around the world to staff illegal establishments ran by organized crime groups. No need to torture a human and subject her to countless risks when one can just buy a robot and sanitize it after every use, then simply pay for the maintenance and amortized depreciation. And the manufacturers would certainly make plenty of male models too because contrary to popular opinion, women do pay for sex to ensure they’ll get the experience they want and you will be hard pressed to find be a more certain return on their investment than a robot. Now you could still imagine an illegal industry trading in real humans for added kink, but when a much safer, legal, and human option is within easy reach, it would more likely become a niche market. Try to outlaw robotic call girls and boys and you’d have to bring a case which would put any sex toy under threat of a swift illegalization and create an uproar from voters. As for the robots themselves, they’re just doing what they will be programmed to do and nothing you can do or say will hurt them since they’ll lack real emotions.

Not for long though, says David Levy in his 2007 book which declares that with enough advancement in AI, a whole string of human-robot relationships and even marriages will take off. From a psychological standpoint, his thesis is sound. There are numerous people out there who crave attention from other humans but simply don’t know how to get it, using Real Dolls and products like them as not only sexual but emotional surrogates which actually serves to make them even more befuddled by the seeming irrationality of who they sometimes call "organic partners," creating a cycle of co-dependence on their synthetic substitutes. Add some AI that will make those machines more animated, give them perceived moods and ideas, and voila! Why even look for a bothersome, unpredictable, hormonally driven organic partner when a controllable synthetic one is right here and could be fine tuned to be exactly what you’d like? And if you spend years taking care of this machine, why not somehow commemorate the bond just like the organics do? Well, that’s where we enter the legal realm’s difficulties for this scenario. You won’t be able to marry a robot for the same reason you can’t marry toasters or cell phones. Even AI-enabled machines are not entities with free will that can give their consent. If you write a boyfriend or girlfriend routine, of course the robot will consent to whatever you want. It’s in the code.

Also, what about the courts’ idea of whether the human can legitimately even consider marrying or being in an emotional relationship with a robot? It would be one thing if humans didn’t seem to show a preference for the company of other humans, but we do. And as we’ve seen, those who may be the most likely to treat a robot as we would treat a significant other could well be substituting human contact. Would a judge consider someone who finds himself — because let’s be honest, it’s usually males who experience this — unable to relate to girls or women around him and turns to inanimate objects for emotional and sexual gratification, as mentally fit to have a legal relationship with any entity other than another person? On the other side of the argument, I could see activists making the claim that we can’t force someone to conform to whatever the social custom is at the time because that’s discriminatory, and argue that a sufficiently engaging AI should have personhood and be allowed to give consent for things like marriage. But these are not going to be easy arguments to make and if there ever are official human-robot marriages or a big explosion in human-robot relationships, expect there to be a lot of acrimony about it in the media. There won’t be smooth transitions and any incident in which human users of sex bots get injured or an AI goes haywire will be agonizingly dissected during the debates.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the PhDs who have trouble turning their education into stable incomes. Quite a few undergraduate students are also ending up making a lot less than they may have expected, and while you can say that the compensation premium for a bachelor’s degree hasn’t changed very much even during much of the Great Recession, the worst salaries in decades have effectively made that premium worth far less than it once was. In fact it’s a neat accounting trick that helps for-profit trade schools and college lenders. They can lure in students by showing the relative premium of a college degree but forget to mention that in real dollars, this premium gives graduates far less purchasing power than they had five years ago. Oh and that’s if they do manage to get a job, which may or many not even be in their field. But come on, they did the right thing, they’re obviously on the way to something great, right? After all, they studied hard enough to get into college and after applying themselves earned degrees, exactly as mom, dad, and everyone else around them told them they’ll have to do to get a good job and start a career. How could it be that we send millions of students to college to spend all that time, money, and effort, and have them rewarded by crushing debt and unemployment?

But the sad fact is that this is exactly what we obliviously do while pretending that the system in which we’re working is fundamentally just and seldom fails to reward hard workers and good scholars. All right, why don’t we look at it another way? A lot of the welfare PhDs spend tens of thousands of dollars getting degrees in all sorts of humanities disciplines for which there’s little demand so surely they must be to blame for their bad situations. How many people will be interested in employing someone who wrote a dissertation on the social dynamics portrayed in silent films? Who but a handful of universities need a PhD in theology? This may be a good way to salvage the seeming fairness of the system but it’s fundamentally flawed. Yes, as I’ve said many times myself, you can’t rely on a degree in humanities to pay your bills, but at the same time, the problem isn’t that humanities PhDs are ending up with big loans and empty pockets, it’s that a degree does not guarantee sustainable, full time work. Even the most highly demanded STEM disciplines are subject to the whims of the market and predicting exactly what will be needed in what city and by what companies in four years before you even start your first class, would be an exercise in clairvoyance. Yet we expect college students to perform this feat every year and then fume when they fail to fare any better than a psychic. Of course they can’t do it.

On the part of the humanities scholars who find themselves out of work and academics who find themselves under attack, some write articles berating modern society for ignoring their passion for crass consumerism. I understand it may be disheartening to know that the world cared more about Twilight than Joyce and I agree, it’s really quite sad. At the time time, people need food, shelter, security, roads, and medicine. It’s not that PhD after PhD is discarded by society for daring not to care about the latest Angry Birds sequel or choose to study the most obscure language in the world to mine it for insights into human culture, but that its immediate and material needs have to take precedence over their academic ones. Society doesn’t tell you to crank out a little metal widget because it needs to print some navel-gazing self-help treatise or load another trite pop bleating on iTunes, but because it needs to fix a road, or develop a new antibiotic, or write some new software to keep important financial transactions secure. It doesn’t want the luxury to plan for its new generations and the best you can do is try to be at the right place, at the right time to find a career close to what you like to do, and when you get there, there may not be a reward for college or good grades and a C- student may be your boss. This is how our world works today and let’s not pretend that there’s some magical combination of degrees, GPAs, and professional credentials that will save you when you find yourself in a really bad economy…

Now, remember that New Age human origins stories and creationist tales are extremely similar, they just use different buzzwords and come to a different conclusion at the end. Whereas religious fundamentalists declare that after being created humans must worship their one true deity not to get tortured in the afterlife, New Agers twist their spirituality into a sort of theistic secularism in which any deity you worship is just fine and dandy, as long as you recognize that you should worship someone or something because it created you. Because both systems want to convince you that you’re created rather than evolved, and are just lucky to even be here, they’ll use very similar rhetorical tactics of decry evolution in its scientific sense as an utter impossibility and do it by horrifically mangling its definition, the evidence for it, and what it entails, all too often proclaiming that visionary scientists are rebelling against the very notion of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology we know today like so…

An interesting experiment and indeed correct in that we are still evolving, however to attribute it to the Victorian, matter-based, Darwinian model of evolution is backward-thinking and flawed given the recent leaps and bounds in metaphysical sciences and physical historical evidence [against] linear evolution. The ideology [that] we randomly mutated from ocean slime to knuckle-dragging neanderthal long-long lost cousins to our current incarnation is one that [has] been dogmatically accepted into mainstream evolutionary hegemony without challenge until recent years.

Holy shoggoth on a fish stick, where do we start? Probably the first thing to do would be to point out that what was laid out before us was the Pokemon model of evolution rather than an accurate description of how living things change and survive, and that this imbecility is absolutely no different from Ken Ham’s big declarations of how science is overthrowing evolutionary theory or parodies intended to ridicule evolutionary biology by those who lack any understanding of it, often willfully. Considering that we see all living things, including us, evolving and going through natural selection regardless of what self-proclaimed experts will tell you, there should be no doubt about the idea that life on our planet is in constant flux. But apparently, there’s all sorts of unnamed, uncited evidence that evolution is all wrong and a good chunk of this evidence apparently comes in the form of metaphysical treatises. Astute readers may recognize that metaphysics is just a buzzword-larded branch of theology, also known as speculations about the supernatural, also known as musings of a creative bunch really not interested in any tangible scientific research or experimentation. If utter ignorance with a nod to those who spend most of their time speculating about the sound on the color blue are your best challenges to the theory of evolution as it stands, no wonder it continues to be the mainstream idea.

The latest science suggests we are intelligently designed not by some sentient humanistic being from on high, [by] a higher, energetic, source intelligence. Einstein’s Unified Field theory equation was completed in 2007. The breakthrough proves everything: matter (which derives from energy, which is what we’re made from) all natural laws and processes link to one underlying, unifying consciousness – aka, God, Source, Allah, Yaweh – pick your favourite.

Paging Charlene Werner to the know-nothing ward, paging Dr. Werner. Why do New Age crackpots love to do their best impressions of Marquis de Sade’s more aggressive experiments with the hired help on the laws of mass-energy equivalence? How do they graduate form middle school not knowing what the term energy even means to then go on and abuse it to justify their notions of mystical vibrations? Matter is not some sort of a lower vibration of energy, it’s very much its own thing. But since it can be generated by energy, it can be turned back into it with the speed of light in a vacuum square representing the exchange rate of the transaction. That is all that mass-energy equivalence says about our bodies’ composition. How this points to some sort of big, irrefutable volume of proof that a singular entity spawned the cosmos, only our overzealous fashionista and a stable of quantum woo cranks who would fail a basic physics class seem to know. Just like a fundamentalist will point to the Big Bang and say that it was God’s hand, so too does this New Ager and declare it so by virtue of her ignorance of how mass-energy equivalence works. And of course there are almost magical invocations of the bizarre quantum realm which serves as the New Age deus ex machina for the most outlandish woo…

Quantum physicist Amit Goswami supports the existence of a God consciousness, “The evidence for God is within us, but to see it we have to be subtle. To live it, we have to grow. Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things – God and the world – but one thing, consciousness. But the problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monastic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. Quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics.”

Quantum physics studies some very strange things. Very strange. Things that laugh in the face of causality, typically obeying the laws of physics only begrudgingly, delighting in every possible loophole they can find. At the same time, however, quantum mechanics has nothing to do with deities or consciousness, just motions and fluctuations of matter and energy in their smallest and most critical phases. If you’re not studying matter, energy, or their discrete quantum states, you’re not studying anything. You’re gazing into your own navel while you ooh and aah at the lint trapped in it and pretend that you’ve found some great insight into the workings of universe. Saying that quantum physics is not a magical mantra that lets you justify anything you want is not an indictment of scientists’ myopia, it’s like pointing out the fact that no matter how much you try to pretend you’re an enlightened, non-corporeal entity, if a car hits you, it will crush your bones and squish your organs. And the sheer arrogance of this New Ageism just makes my head spin. No, it’s not that they have no proof for all their wild assertions, it’s just that you’re too materialistic and simple-minded to grasp how their oh so precious and open minds see the quantum hand of God. It’s just arrogant creationism at its very worst.

Really folks, it’s ok to say "I don’t know" once in a while. The world will not stop. The universe will not descend upon you with an unholy fury if you take a minute to admit that you don’t have all the answers instead of going off the rails with abject nonsense. Here’s an exercise for all you New Age types out there. Pick a quiet room in your home, sit in the lotus position, and ask yourself some big, really big questions. How did life arise? What triggered the Big Bang? Where did I leave my keys? What is the purpose of my life? Does size matter? And as you feel yourself starting to pull out whatever vapid cliché you read in The Secret or Deepak Chopra’s attempts to mimic a complete thought, stop and say aloud "I don’t know." Just keep doing that until you start to ask new questions about how life should be defined and what quantum physics really studies, and realize that you will never know all the answers because you’re just human and that repeating "quantum" or "consciousness" will not summon a library of empirical data proving whatever belief you hold. That partial knowledge against a very confusing and constant hum of questions to which there are no easy and convenient answers, is the human condition. Make the best of it rather than wasting your time reassuring yourself with stylish nonsense.

Generally, most skeptical blogs follow the same trend as many scientists when they approach liberals and see them as more or less natural allies in spreading facts and education. After all, conservatives often add an inordinate amount of animosity to anything that contradicts their dogma and will immediately start bashing all the groups they loathe in response. But just because the left doesn’t object to teaching good science doesn’t mean that its anti-scientific attitudes aren’t a problem or that they can be downplayed when talking about anti- scientific movements. Just like religious fundamentalists have creationism, New Age converts have a theistic evolution narrative that muddles quantum mechanics and a hodgepodge of scientific jargon into pointless ruminations on the nature of the human soul. They will also follow self-aggrandizing notions of determinism which argue that humans are a predetermined outcome of evolution, and whatever they’ll need to add to the idea to make it work, they will. At the turn of the past century, they added heavy doses of Occultism, mysticism, and spiritualism. In the middle of the century, they layered on conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, based on either real world events, their ruminations on Occultism, or a bizarre mix of both. Nowadays, there’s a vast and diverse range of conspiracies, ancient astronauts, pseudoscientific profundities, and plain old woo that’s been repackaged for new generations as some great illumination into the secrets of the universe.

While the religious fundamentalist will pound the Bible with his homeschooled kids and teach them that they are to devote their lives to a deity that created them and requires their submission and that they are treat every fact contrary to this premise as inherently false and evil, New Age disciples will tell their kids that science is a materialistic, left-brained, arrogant pursuit of truth without the use of meditation that falls pray to conspiracies by bizarre secret societies, and that they’re spiritual beings who can get in tune with nature. In either case, we have anti-scientific attitudes preaching that science leads to nihilism and that the only true path to knowledge lies elsewhere. Yes, sure, the New Age followers of post-modernist woomeisters who fill up HuffPo with their best impressions of The Dude when it comes to scientific literacy (because you know man, gravity is like your opinion and anyway, it’s not like we know what gravity was meant to teach us) aren’t trying to change the law to get quantum woo into the classroom, but they are certainly not friends and allies of scientific education. They just view science as a starting point for their brand of beliefs. Get someone educated enough about quantum physics and biology and they’ll be able to "get it" when you talk to them about the alien visitors and life being a holographic projection of your past consciousnesses, just like any New Age bestseller will lay out for you.

But despite the long standing dedication to warping science into justifications for their personal beliefs, New Agers lack the kind of focus you get from a single, dogmatic, and very zealously religious following which is a lot less forgiving about making it up as you go along and demands far more conformity in beliefs. The right is much better organized and unified in its efforts, something you’ll hear from every blogger covering their war on facts they don’t want to hear and findings they don’t want taught. If you were surrounded by two dogs, with one barking, snarling, and foaming at the mouth, and the other circling behind you more or less quietly, you’ll pay a lot more attention to the threatening beast right in front of you, as you probably should. However, you shouldn’t assume that the dog behind you won’t bite you when you’re not looking or that its jaws can’t put you in world of hurt just because it’s not actively threatening you right now. And so while the homogenous vocal right lets out war cry after war cry, a lot of science bloggers fail to highlight the far more calm, but very virulent anti-scientific rumblings from the subdued and more heterogeneous left, Phil included. For me, it’s very hard to say that the right is more anti-scientific than the left because as creationists support a pro-pseudoscience bill, rabid anti- vaccinationists are pushing for exemptions from immunizations while citing conspiracy theories…

[ illustration by Yang Xueguo ]

But here’s the big question we should all ponder for a minute. Since when is it our job to make sure that facts fit in with the narratives people want to hear? Wouldn’t we just be lying to them if we misrepresent the data we collect and the research we conduct? And for what purpose? To make them believe us not because we have the data but because we cherry picked and massaged it for popular appeal? If the goal is to simply tell people what they want to hear, why even bother doing any science in the first place? Might as well just concoct a good story and run with that. This is why, as Bartlett notes, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne cites religious beliefs, not the quality of evolution as a popular narrative as the main culprit in evolution denial and he has the data on his side to prove his point. When he cites polls in which some 60% of Americans say they’ll just continue with their belief system no matter what they science says, that’s not even a red flag anymore, it’s a wailing alarm. If you really think that you’re going to get people who reject science to suddenly accept it when you just let them substitute their personal ideology for facts they don’t like, you are headed down the path to this…

At the very least, though, evolution’s weakness as a story creates a PR opportunity for creationists. For example, one Christian Web site tries to fit evolution into a standard fairy-tale narrative, telling the intentionally absurd tale of an amoeba’s transformation from salamander to monkey to man, all thanks to a character called Mutation who just waves a magic wand. It doesn’t read like it was written by someone with a background in biology, but it’s hard to disagree with the conclusion that evolution is a “strange story.”

Well of course it’s a strange story when it’s written by someone who has no idea what evolution is and tries to desperately wrangle it into a narrative of personal glorification, i.e. that humans are somehow the pinnacle of the evolutionary process or at least on their way towards it and our appearance was predetermined, or to turn it into a laughable parody of the facts. And of course it doesn’t fit into our tidy self-centered vision of nature, but then again neither do electrons, or black holes, or stars, or quantum mechanics which can technically violate causality according to a recent experiment. That’s the whole point of doing science, to find out what can and what does happen rather than weave a tale everyone involved finds palatable. Those so wrapped up in all the dogmas they hold so near and dear they will rabidly refuse to let them go no matter what, and treat something that challenges their views with contempt without even bothering to try and understand it, are just not going to care what the facts have to say and it’s their attitude that’s the problem here, not the data. As long as they don’t hear the story they want to hear, they’ll move goalposts, argue, and dismiss anything that we have to say out of hand no matter how much evidence we present. Further insulating them from facts by demanding that we give room for their favorite just so stories in science classrooms only makes things worse for everyone.

Just like giving a petulant child who throws an embarrassing temper tantrum in the middle of a store what he wants is a bad parenting strategy, placating anti-scientific crusaders by letting them do whatever they please, dismissing all the damage they do to public education and discourse as their inalienable right, is pretty much the absolute worst way to teach science. Next time the hypothetical spoiled brat wants something, he will just throw another tantrum in a public place to force you to submit. And next time anti-science crusaders want their preferential treatment from school boards and lawmakers, they’ll just engage in the same hysterics and paint any effort to teach actual science to potential future Babbages, Einsteins, and Darwins, as nothing less than a war on their very right to exist. Appeasement is not a valid strategy against those who believe that their word is to be treated as law and once in a while, they need to be politely but firmly told that while they have a right to go to whatever house of worship they want and pray to whatever deity their desire in any way they see fit, schools will teach objective, documented, verifiable facts to students, not serve as their indoctrination centers.

Leaving aside the various dramas and the cast of rather sketchy characters profiled many times already, one of the key issues here is that in the online world, the mob follows a narrative that motivates it into action, not a set of facts per se. Obviously, not everything you see on the internet is true because after all, the internet hosts the musings of the Time Cube guy and at least a dozen retellings of all the elaborate conspiracy theories that were forcefully crammed into the Illuminatus Trilogy. Ordinarily, that pseudoscience, postmodernist New Age woo, and conspiracy mongering would simply lay there in forgotten or obscure corners of the web because it needs some sort of catalyst to take off and ensnare its followers and prophets. And these things certainly can and do find disciples who are either confused by science they want to understand but can’t quite grasp, or will not accept as valid for whatever reason, those who want to seem scholarly and profound without putting in all that much effort into either, or those eternally paranoid that someone is out to get them. Nasty tales about a celebrity are even easier to embrace, especially in a culture like that of South Korea, where any mediocre high school student shouldn’t end up getting a graduate degree from Stanford with a good GPA then do music.

In fact, most of the rage regarding Lee was about his education and how it should’ve been impossible for him to get good grades at an elite college since by all accounts he was a do-nothing in school. His critics seem to be incapable of considering that he may have demonstrated a talent that was interesting to Stanford and took his studies seriously when he realized that this time, grades are serious business. Getting into elite colleges in the U.S. is not a matter of having the right test score or having the right GPA, or joining enough clubs. But in many people’s minds, that GRE/SAT/GPA/extracurricular digit combination is like some sort of numerological incantation that opens the doors to Ivy League institutions and life-long prosperity. This is why parents will all too often drive themselves and their children crazy with endless study and college prep tests, especially when we’re talking about Asian cultures where the right test score can determine your path in life. For some of Lee’s most outspoken tormentors he either cheated by getting into Stanford, which means that their kids’ admission to an elite school would now be meaningless, or he lied and never went to Stanford which would mean they’re doing everything right with their kids. And so they chose to believe the latter because it required no change on their part and no reevaluation of their priorities or their parental style, just verbally crucifying a rapper.

Speed was something they certainly got. Workers responded to task alerts within 500 milliseconds when the alerts came within about five seconds of their pre-recruitment for a task. Even 20 seconds out, the responses still came in under three seconds. Not bad at all for a crowdsourced real-time system but then again, it’s not a startling result because the crowd was being prepaid for its services, limited to 50 people, and tasks came at them quickly and furiously. So we know that the crows replied quickly but we don’t know how well it did or if its reliable enough to be prepaid for projects more complex than making a simple classification or clicking some buttons on a form. A fun fact mentioned in the paper was that spam is actually a really massive crowdsourced endeavor paying about 0.5¢ per word. You see how well that works, right? Or rather you don’t because you live in the 21st century and have spam filters for your e-mail and IM. But really, do take a trip to your spam folder to see how many ways one can misspell words you wouldn’t ordinarily think would be that easy to misspell and the sheer amount of hours and effort wasted on something that won’t be seen by some 99.999% of its targets and if it is, promptly deleted and blocked. Bottom line: crowdsourcing menial tasks isn’t all that great.

Even worse, with enough computing grunt and a big enough server farm, you could do the work of a massive crowd in performing said menial tasks, and probably with higher accuracy because your program will not drift off or get bored. It’ll be cheaper and  more reliable too. Crowdsourcing shines when users are given complex and challenging things to do. Scientific research currently tapping dedicated gamers and amateur astronomy buffs are seeing their data analyzed faster and faster and veteran users are tackling more and more complex problems which yield possible answers to questions that stymied small labs unable to throw adequate brain power at the problems. And that may well be where the future is, crowds being paid to tackle complex issues, design new products, and come up with practical applications for new ideas to monetize them, earning cash rewards in the process to keep them engaged and excited. Maybe the future of work isn’t sitting in a drab gray cubicle from 8 am to 5 pm, but lounging in a coffee shop, playing a game that could help molecular biologists unlock new pathways for more effective drugs, or helping programmers fine-tune their designs for oh, say, I’m just going to guess an aspiring AI framework or something like it by experimenting with it, and getting paid by labs and corporations for all their efforts and the mountains of useful data they’ll generate?

See: Bernstein, M. et al. (2012). Analytic methods for optimizing realtime crowdsourcing arXiv: 1204.2995v1

First off, it’s important to point out that no one is saying that the AVF is doing a bad job because despite all the flaws you can find in any large bureaucracy, it proved itself to be highly resilient and extremely potent. The kind of long, drawn out, low intensity, precision, high-stakes wars with shadowy components it fights could only be fought by a small handful of other militaries though probably not as effectively. When political expediency said it should take a back seat in Libya, it couldn’t because it was the only military capable of supporting bombers, drones, and precision weapons needed for the mission. Decades of investment went into creating it and the long years of the Cold War enabled it to defend a long stretch of Europe and Asia, which is part of the reason why the U.S. spends more than all the countries in Europe and Southeast Asia combined. But all that buildup with few enemies to fight has turned it into a bludgeon to be used by lawmakers and activists with a very itchy trigger finger who know that the public at large won’t mind a war in which the only necessary support is vocal, usually made in the form of a magnet on the back of their car. Sure, the public wasn’t happy with the Iraq War, and it has deeply soured on Afghanistan because both became tedious and expensive quagmires. But, says a chorus of pundits, the war in Afghanistan could have ended much, much sooner, and the Iraq War may have never started if millions of Americans had some skin in the game and would have to go and fight.

While I can see their point, this seems like a case of Monday morning quarterbacking. We know today that the vague allusions to WMDs made by Saddam Hussein were a bluff, and while we knew fairly well that evidence for their existence was extremely shaky and came from questionable sources, the fury over the events of 9/11 was still very much in the air. Thousands were signing up for the AVF to fight as a result, and it’s likely that the people who would’ve supposedly stopped the war from starting would’ve reported to the local MEPS ready for basic training or officer school. A more pervasive argument might have been that much more attention would have been paid to the war effort and mismanagement would be met with far louder and swifter howls from all the families whose sons and daughters were drafted, a climate which would’ve pressured the administration to actually listen to sound advice and discredited Dick Cheney’s seething because so many would be quick to point out his deferments and his eagerness to advocate sending drafted soldiers into battle after dodging his call to do his duty. So perhaps the war wouldn’t have been stopped but it would’ve been ran better, with quick changes in strategy and heeding expert advice. Would the draft have been extremely unpopular? Yes. But this is the point. Wars aren’t supposed to be like a game you’d watch on TV. They’re serious business and they’re to be treated as such, and it’s unfair when those who refuse to fight wars, promote them.

So would reinstating the draft stop wars? Very unlikely. Will it be tough to institute? Absolutely. But at the same time, the diagnosis that the military is drifting away from the civilians and the AVF has been shouldering much of the burden for wars of whim and unfairly so, seems to make a lot of sense and has been echoed by Robert Gates when he was the Secretary of Defense during his speeches urging college students and graduates to consider military service. It’s understood that those who volunteer to do so make a choice and can endure the stress placed on them. But at the same time, it’s one thing to volunteer to defend one’s country and protect its allies and interests abroad, and end up fighting for a decade because the government feels free to send you to war and the public more or less tunes out the fact that you and your fellow soldiers are fighting wars started because they could be, with vague plans that don’t define when your mission is over, and largely ignored by a disturbing majority of the public you volunteered to protect. And maybe that public should contribute their time and effort to the defense of its own nation, seeing firsthand what war is, and thinking very carefully about what will happen when another one is declared and whether it’s really a good idea to fight that particular war…

Asking about the capacity of the brain in terms of bits and bytes is like asking how many light years it takes to reach Mars or how many gallons are in a kilometer. Neurons don’t work or store data in binary, and when you see comparisons of their firing to a one and relative dormancy to a zero, similar to byte code when it comes to measuring a neuron’s capacity, you’re seeing extremely gross oversimplifications leading to a dead end. I’ve lost count of how many times I found myself in debates with futurists trying to derive some sort of bizarre math out of an average neuron’s firing patterns and then trying to jam the resulting mathematical monstrosity into a supercomputer’s CPU, so this misconception is surprisingly persistent and the question keeps being asked despite its irrelevancy to how the human brain actually works. Here’s a sample of the logic in question…

The math behind these estimates is fairly simple. The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons seems capable of making 1,000 connections, which represents about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.

Where to start with this game of whack-an-assumption? First of all, we’re assuming that each neuron will only send a single byte through the synapse. Secondly, synapses don’t necessarily do the work of data storage as neurons themselves seem to light up when the mind recognizes something, they’re the pathways by which all those neurons talk to each other. Thirdly, not all neurons are involved in data storage because quite a few are there to process data from the environment and trigger responses to it, and our brain is compartmentalized to spread its workload to neurons in the right configurations to handle certain types of tasks. Information we tend to store for a long time seems to be controoled by the hippocampus, rather than the entirety of the brain, while a part of the brain called the V4 cortex is dedicated primarily to feature extraction for the process of recognizing objects. Fourthly, we don’t know the data density of the brain and don’t really have ways to measure it with any kind of reliability, so any straightforward multiplication is not a valid approach by any means, and thankfully, in this presentation of it, the author acknowledges that it’s completely off base. Many others just roll with it.

Now, we could say the experiments involving an artificial hippocampus can give us a rough representation of how many bits memory in the brain takes, but the hippocampus doesn’t store memories, but the keys to other parts of the brain to reconstruct them. I’m sure that by now you get the point that comparing neurons to a used bit in a hard drive is absolutely irrelevant and doesn’t even need to even be entertained as a question. Its one of those popular pseudoscientific notions that’s well past its prime, like the factoid that we supposedly use a measly 10% of our brain when conscious and the other 90% supposedly house the potential for revolutionary mental prowess or extrasensory perception. It’s been a sci-fi movie trope for so long, it still persists, but most of the population now knows that fMRI tests show 99% of the brain abuzz pretty much constantly. And it’s time for the same to happen with this awkward comparison, so whenever someone tries to equate neurons and a typical hard drive, please don’t hold back and let this person know that he’s doing the equivalent of measuring time in feet or weight in megahertz. Neurobiologists and computer scientists everywhere will thank you.

One of the reasons why the names of the devices are in cryptographic convention is because cryptography is the best way to follow what’s actually happening. Imagine sending two secure e-mails containing two entirely separate passwords to two friends, then, after these e-mails have been received, forwarding copies of those passwords to a system administrator who might just randomly reset them. And when those passwords are reset, somehow, your two friends get the new passwords instead of the ones you just sent them even though the system administrator hasn’t even received the original ones to reset yet. This prompts the question of why and how in the hell this could possibly happen. According to the researchers, we could view the measures of the photons’ states not as a discrete result but a sort of probability list of their possible states, i.e. they’re both entangled and not entangled depending on what will happen through the rest of the system. Then, when their fate is decided, the waveform collapses into the particular result like the famous Schrödinger’s cat taken one notch higher up the causality ladder, and which will only be truly dead or alive when the observer writes down the result of his or her observations into the official logbook after another observer confirms them.

Hold on though, what about the entanglement being nearly instantaneous? Maybe it’s more simple than all of this mumbo jumbo about collapsing waveforms and we don’t need to awaken the zombie of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? Victor could have entangled the photons and the spooky action moving much, much faster than the speed of light reached the detectors before the first measurements. We broke the rules of special relativity which dictate that information can’t travel faster than light, but surely this is a far more elegant solution, right? Unfortunately, we can’t prove that information travels faster than light as shown by the neutrino saga at the OPERA labs, and until we find a way to detect honest to goodness tachyons, we have to follow the special relativity framework, and in the experiment, the each half of the photon pair was measured a few femtoseconds prior to reaching Victor. Granted, since a glitch in OPERA’s fiendishly delicate arrangement turned into a 60 nanosecond error, surely a femtosecond or two discrepancy could be caused by a bad angle or a tiny manufacturing defect inside of the fiber optic wire as well. This is why the researchers suggest more experiments using much longer wires to make sure that the delay is even longer to see if their results will be further supported. However, the experimental setup here has been well calibrated and seems rather unlikely to be subject to a systematic error, so you probably shouldn’t bet the farm on their results being wrong.

Provided that future research validates their experiment, what does this mean for practical applications? Well, we may not have to cool a quantum computer to near absolute zero to measure its output if we can simply collapse the waveform with an algorithm that uses it as an input. Furthermore, we could implement quantum computer-like features in photonic computing for speeding up ordinarily time consuming processes we can’t readily parallelize across several CPUs with an algorithm that tries to collapse the waveforms on all possible relationships between objects, or all objects with a certain value. So obviously this is an exciting result and it’s interesting to think about all the things we could do with this quantum phenomenon in the realm of computing and ultimately, communications technology. And one also wonders whether objects much bigger than run of the mill photons can be induced to laugh in causality’s face by being cooled to near absolute zero since in the recent past, experiments have shown that objects much larger than we’d think can adopt the odd behaviors of subatomic particles and what we can ultimately do with these super-cooled pseudo-quantum things. But first and foremost, as with any groundbreaking and bizarre experiment, it may be a good idea to replicate it to rule out any interference or technical anomalies to avoid another OPERA-esque drama…

See: Ma, X., et al. (2012). Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping NatPhys DOI: 10.1038/nph…

Just because mining asteroids for precious metals to sell on Earth isn’t profitable, doesn’t mean that the idea is a complete wash. Asteroid mining would be a huge boon for deep space exploration because you can use an asteroid as an orbiting fuel depot which would allow fairly lightweight SSTO craft to dock with a fully fueled, ready for exploration craft just waiting for a crew. And this seems to be the core of the Planetary Resources big plan since they’re trying to find water and other relatively easily obtainable assets needed to maintain habitats in space, storing them for future use when the actual mining will begin. Meanwhile, they could easily try to sell access to all these resources to space agencies. Of course the thorny issue of space property will come into play here and we’ll have to confront it sooner rather than later. While the U.S. and every other space power did not sign on to a UN treaty declaring that all resources mined in space are to be evenly distributed between all nations, The Outer Space Treaty presents challenges to claiming ownership of an asteroid and charging fees to access its resources, challenges discussed in far more detail in the previous link. But assuming this issue will be addressed, we can say that so far, the idea is fairly solid and quite doable because it cuts out the step that will financially crush an asteroid mining venture, i.e. bringing back all the material to be refined.

But this leaves us with a gap between getting everything prepared for mining and setting up a robust network of filling stations in orbit to support mining operations, and actually extracting the valuable materials. What will actually happen there hasn’t yet been disclosed, perhaps because it’s a company secret or perhaps because the vast roster of idea men behind it doesn’t know yet and is counting on its engineers to come up with a plan which I’m guessing should involve nanotechnology. As science fiction-esque as it sounds, it really is the only viable way to mine asteroids. Rather than refine vast quantities of raw materials, most of them easily found on Earth and bought dirt cheap, by the ton, on the commodities market, Planetary Resources may want to inject a few trillion particles designed to bond specifically with the molecules of precious metals they want to sell. The particles will flow through the veins and back, gathering platinum, gold, iridium, and other useful metals along the way, then presenting a mostly refined clump of valuable material to be placed in a spaceship and flown to the planet’s surface below. A new spaceship arriving to collect more mined materials can bring back more of these particles, which could technically be recycled as they’re stripped off the metals they retrieved. We have a blueprint for making such nanities today, just not the resources or the ability to manufacture them on industrial scales. With a company willing to put this technology to good use, this may well change in 10 to 15 years.

Again, to reiterate, the nanotechnology aided mining process is my guess, not part of their plan, but since they are taking such pains to scout for appropriate asteroids and set up basic resource havens on them, I wouldn’t doubt that they’ve taken the costs of bringing back raw ore for refinement back to Earth in their business plans and thought of something very much out of the box to do the mining in situ. Peter Diamandis and Sergey Brin are both involved with the Singularitarian movement and are no doubt well aware of the advances slowly, but very surely, being made in the field of nanotechnology. It stands to reason that they would at least consider an industrial applications for custom nano-particles and know researchers who can make them. However, there is a huge leap from a few proof of concept tests in the lab to practical commercial use, and it will take years of testing on larger and larger scales to get to invisible extraction of precious metals from asteroids, which may be why they’re starting out with the basics and building out their fuel depots. They could make enough money from that alone to finance the R&D of their mining techniques. Of course I might be barking up the wrong tree here but so far, in the absence of any detailed plans, I feel comfortable enough about my hunch to stick with it.

Since the most sexually repressive regimes around the world are Muslim quasi-theocracies where a woman can be seriously asked to cover her eyes as not to tempt men and punished if she doesn’t comply, there is an obligatory cry towards something other than misogyny in the Muslim world, one sure to fall on deaf ears. If you ever wonder why we’re not trying to explore the solar system and establish cities on Mars, I’d love to point you to the amount of energy and resources expended by fanatical fundamentalists to crushing every last form of sexuality or rights for women in these theocratic lands. If we harnessed their energy for something actually productive and beneficial to society, we would’ve solved most global problems already just because we would hold so many summits and negotiations that eventually a solution would be found by sheer persistence. Such is their frustration at having sexual desires and longing to experiment freely with the fantasies they keep under lock and key in their heads, they erupt in fury at all those attractive women around them, blaming them for their self-imposed psycho-sexual confinement and casting them as evil temptresses, all because they were told to fear their own natural desires. And when they do actually get married and are allowed to have sex, they are not allowed to learn anything about it and are often doomed to decades of dissatisfaction and repression.

Ask a religious fundamentalist, any religious fundamentalist, about this lifestyle and you’ll be told that they are extremely happy in keeping as pure as possible in the eyes of their deity. Considering that this it the only thing they know and that an equally repressed, embarrassed, and self-punitive mentor told them that any pleasures during their sexual lives were of the Devil, I’m sure that quite a few are. But if they’re all so thrilled to live in this world of only procreative intercourse, why are religious fanatics who lead them and so many of their followers so obsessed with talking about all the sinful things out there in such explicit detail? Oh the horror of a secular lifestyle with its one night stands, and couples engaging in premarital sex, and pornography, they cry. Why the things you can see in adult videos, they’ll continue and proceed to list in lurid detail every scenario, scene, and position offensive to their deity. Yes, they’ve watched all these sickening videos and read all those filthy books cover to cover, but only to know the kind of demonic evil the secular world is capable of unleashing! And they’ll continue to do it not because they’re somehow titillated nearly to orgasm, mind you, but to keep an eye on the enemy and a hand on the… um… trigger, yeah, that’s it, trigger. This is why the Muslim world ranks among the top porn consumers on the web and other devout fundamentalists quietly join it at nights.

But while the guilt and shame driven repression of religious fanatics results in sexism and draconian laws to obey a deity they make out to be a judgmental voyeur with a spy cam in every bedroom and shower, there is a reverse albeit far more rare form of extremism on the far left and New Age circles in which women describing themselves as liberated, participate in religions in which male gods are discarded as little more than ghostly phalluses summoned on a Goddess’s whim and existing only for her pleasure, and view sexuality not as just a part of the human experience, but as an ideological and political struggle in which males are interested in subjugation and domination alone and it’s up to women to deny them a conquest. Obviously, sexism against women is much more widespread so these ideas very seldom manifest themselves as full blown misandry, but I’d argue that treating all men as domineering, sleazy scum will be just as damaging to a relationship as seeing all women as little more than demonic temptresses. And since we went this far into the cycle of misery perpetuated by religious fanaticism, we may as well mention those who rebel against repressive upbringings and end up doing things they’ll later regret and wouldn’t have ordinarily done if they were allowed some basic freedom and education about their sexualities rather than kept in the dark out of their parents’ constant shame over their sin of being human with all the contradictions, desires, and emotions that entails.

Now, of course, a society’s goal shouldn’t be hosting some sort of Discordian inspired orgies in the streets, or swing clubs in former church buildings on every corner. I’m sure that’s the horror-fantasy of those who censor anything even remotely lewd on TV and in print only to later be caught watching RedTube with their hand deep in their pants, but that’s certainly not a good idea. No, the goal should be the ability to treat human sexuality as just another facet of existence, as free as possible from politics, shaming, as well as anti-shaming in which a person’s aversion to a certain act is instantly (and very ironically) labeled close-minded. We should be able to discuss sexuality and learn about it so we can decide what we like and what we don’t rather than have orders about which positions are acceptable, what we’re allowed to wear, and have our status in life determined by a repressed and often hypocritical fanatic’s opinion of our genitals, an opinion he vehemently declares to be the absolute and unwavering word of God. We know for a fact that comprehensive sex education works, and it gives people the tools to enjoy their sexuality responsibly and make their own choices. But of course a fanatic would always be horrified by the concept of someone using his or her free will to decide, which is exactly why they have no business dictating how a modern society should behave and to what it should aspire…

Fact is that there are profoundly influential papers which never make it past the preprint stage and there are a number of splashy papers in the highest of the high profile journals not up to snuff, like the GFAJ paper. This is why tenure committees’ current laser-like focus on the homogeneity of research and impact factors don’t just miss the forest for the trees, but go far beyond it. Instead of measuring how ideas are received and who’s working on extending them, they drone on how many other papers cite a scientist’s work even though citations are not the same as additional study and experimentation. If we were to focus on what research really matters and why, and weren’t afraid to pull papers when they’re found to be wrong or shoddily researched, we’d have a much saner scientific climate in the first place. Rather than look at the spikes in retractions as a symptom of a disease in science, we should be looking at them as the immune response of the methodology and promote it while relieving the actual symptoms through new policies, better tenure processes, smarter funding, and an approach to scientific papers as constant works in progress, not monolithic declarations of results. We don’t need ten thousand new papers to be written each year. We just need a few really novel and good ones…

Now, oddly, the answer seems to be yes because they function the same way and there’s no reason why we couldn’t exist with such a substitution to our cellular chemistry. It’s too late now of course because a life form using an XNA wouldn’t be able to replicate with a DNA utilizing organism. In fact, the researcher who identified these possible permutations of hereditary molecules wants to use them to safeguard us from synthetic life, making sure that it could still be hearty enough to survive competition from bacteria that have been around for billions of years while being unable to actually interfere with our current ecosystem. And as Ed points out, the divergence doesn’t stop there as some scientists are adding even more bases to hereditary molecules to try and coax synthetic life forms into producing very unusual amino acids that would be of use to us. Now, this is all obviously pretty cool because this is quite literally tinkering with the foundations of life, both as we know it, and as we think we might know it, but what can it say about the future and the implications of this work? A very straightforward application could be in astrobiology and the probes sent to other worlds could be instructed to detect a wide array of sugars used in XNAs in soil samples, hopefully indicating some alien biota.

But there’s a potential for a different application. Today, we can engineer fairly harmless viruses which deliver small bits of interfering RNA to shut down gene expression in certain disorders, halting their progression to make them easier to treat. One of the ultimate possibilities of this siRNA technology is to keep cancer tumors in stasis, though considering the recent findings that each tumor may house more than ten different strains of harmful genetic anomalies, we need to figure out how to effectively customize them to attack all those different harmful genes first. It’s a tall order to be sure, but the important thing is that we have a plan and there’s a lot of research into this type of genetic engineering underway. Ultimately, this could even open to door to modifying our own gene signaling to drastically improve our quality of life with age, and perhaps even increase life span by manipulating the biology complicit in making us weaker and more prone to death. Nature doesn’t have the expiration date for an organism stamped into its genome which makes it much harder to delay death, but we know that after a while, the repair of wear and tear slows and damage continues to build up until we get weak enough to be taken out by something that might not have killed us if we were younger or a vital organ starts to fail after accumulating too much damage to continue working as it is. A thorough understanding of how genes and gene expression work can help us find ways to repair or even reverse all that damage…

But here’s the serious question. if computing is basically substrate independent, doesn’t it mean that calling human brains computers and likening our personalities to emergent properties of what is basically software, as so many Kurzwelian transhumanists do, is not all that far from the mark? After all, the brain takes in bits of data and performs computations with it to make a decision about what to do next, right? And there are quite a few asynchronous processes going on in the background as well, moving data around to make sure we have some awareness of our environment while going about our daily tasks. We could even liken the movement of signals within the brain to currents flowing through logic gates. How is our brain not like a computer, just in a squishy organic form? Well, going by this this premise we could concede that the brain is a computer, but we would then also have to accept that anything that can interact with its environment and store information must be a computer too. After a certain limit, the definition of a computer would become so broad as to encompass a great deal of the universe and turn into something functionally meaningless for all intents and purposes.

So what would be a better way to define the solider crab computer then? Well, we could say that researchers used soldier crabs to perform some very basic computations and show that in a computer, all that will matter is the ability to encode and decode data. How this data is moved around or what encodes it is up to the actual designer and can differ widely, something already well known in computer science. The only reason why this experiment got some media attention is because it sounds like the kind of odd, whacky science that a pop sci news source loves to cover for its novelty factor. And if the press really wanted to make things interesting, they would’ve looked past the oddball premise and noted that this is one of the reasons why it would be difficult to try and communicate with alien civilizations via active SETI because their computers are highly unlikely to be anything like ours and for all we know, they may well herd bacteria or special molecules through a logic gate encoding base-3 data. To them, our 1s and 0s would be little more than garbage data collected from random phenomena in deep space, and summarily discarded. All of our attempts to distinguish ourselves in a binary format would be for naught, just as their attempts to send back something in base-n would also be lost to our automated systems, interpreted as white, garbled noise passing through space, if it’s interpreted at all.

Maybe that’s another possible solution to the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that intelligent aliens are abundant through the galaxy if not the universe and even live close enough to each other to try communication (though I think it’s rather unlikely based on evolutionary theory’s implications for astrobiology), but wouldn’t you know it, they simply can’t understand each other. Even the story of the mythical Tower of Babel just wouldn’t cover how profound the miscommunication is because even after being punished for attempting to literally touch the sky through sheer ingenuity and cutting-edge engineering, the workers could at least understand that their fellow builders were trying to say something. If they were alien species on different worlds, they wouldn’t even realize that someone was talking to them. Or even talking for that matter. This means that active SETI is unlikely to be successful, especially if it follows the advice of those who say that we need to restrict communication to binary signals only, and that we must be mindful that a burst of data into outer space is akin to walking into a cave in the middle of a vast desert and whistling a few notes. Maybe someone or something will hear it, but don’t get all that hopeful about some creature whistling back because that creature might not even have ears…

See: Gunji, Y., et al. (2012). Robust soldier crab ball gate Complex Systems 20 (2011) 2 arXiv: 1204.1749v1