Summer 2008: End of the World?

[A] giant particle accelerator […] will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer [that some think] might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

[...]

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

  NYTimes

Or, as we know it here at YWA, Dick Cheney’s heart.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment.

That really doesn’t seem so unreasonable a request to me. After all, nobody bothered to try to determine how to dispose of nuclear waste when they went forth to create nuclear reactors, and look at the problems that’s created, which sadly, nobody ever talks about. We’ll just store those “spent” rods until science comes up with the answer. We’re pretty good at rushing in to something without a good plan to get out. And so far, that approach has proved to be problematic.

CERN is a European entity, and so probably isn’t beholden to any lawsuit in Hawaii, but also named in the suit are the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation.

[A] restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

[...]

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

  

If they’re still around to sift, that is.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

Fire it up, boys. This I want to see.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

A Step Closer to Designer Babies

British scientists have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and one man, a procedure that could potentially prevent conditions including epilepsy, diabetes and heart failure.

  Yahoo

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

And While We're Cloning Cybrids....

A California company announced Thursday that it has created cloned human embryos from adult skin cells, a breakthrough which could ultimately lead to the development of cures for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, and other untreatable ailments.

  Raw Story

And not only that…all those Holy Joes are going to have to be very, very careful about their skin, aren’t they? Because if a baby can be made from a skin cell, each and every day they are aborting untold numbers of them.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

And, while we're on the topic, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that a child born from in vitro fertilization performed after the father had died is not a legal heir.

Cybrids Are Here

Scientists at King’s College London and the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne will now inject human DNA into empty eggs from cows, to create embryos known as cytoplasmic hybrids that are 99.9 per cent human in genetic terms.

  UK Times

....hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Can you see where “myths” about half-human, half-animal creatures came from? The past is the future. Ouroboros. Or maybe a Möbius strip.

Eggs from cows. That sounds funny.

Science Break

Future "improved" automobile.

Click for larger view

Man, I hope not. At least not until cars drive themselves. We've already got problems with cell phones and i-stuff.

Scientists are working on taking dead hearts and reanimating them, working on animals so far, but you know the intended beneficiaries are human. That’s just what we need on this planet at this time – people who live even longer.

Maybe it’s too early to be concerned, as we still haven’t broken through cryology obstacles (as far as I know). James Lovelock, whom we might call the father of cryobiology, began another sort of reanimation experimentation just after WWII – long-term freezing and subsequent thawing of living creatures – poor hamsters.

He also coined the Gaia theory.

Gaia theory proposes the existence of a system of complex feedback mechanisms that work across the whole of the Earth’s surface; these involve both living and non-living parts of the biosphere which act to keep the chemistry and temperature of the planetary surface comfortable for life. In some important respects this entire system could be considered as akin to ‘living’ itself.

[...]

To this day Gaia theory is still far from being universally accepted among the scientific community. Although Lovelock was careful to stress that his theory wasn't suggesting that the Earth was actually alive– only that the Earth system mimics a living, self-regulating entity in some ways– many scientists struggled with the analogy. For a start the Earth doesn’t eat or move purposefully, and it has never displayed any discernible interest in mating with neighbouring planets.

  Damn Interesting

Fer crissakes, she’s old! One does lose drive.

Or maybe she was just born wise.

Your Sunday Sermon

The Institute for Creation Research in Dallas has been trying to get science accreditation from the state.

The ICR, which wants permission from the coordinating board to offer a master’s in science education, believes, contrary to a mountain of indisputable scientific evidence and God-given common sense, that a few thousand years ago the good Lord took six literal days to create the sun, moon, plants, people, dinosaurs and the apes we didn’t evolve from.

(For those now wondering if dinosaurs coexisted with humans - yes, ICR says, Noah had compact baby dinos on the Ark and after the Flood people hunted them into extinction. This explanation, IMO, is an improvement over the one I heard as a kid - that dinosaur fossils were planted by God to test our faith.)

Evolutionary thinking is not only a falsehood, according to ICR, but also causes abortion, promiscuity, drug abuse, and homosexuality, according to their irony-free Web site. The Institute requires all faculty members and students to accept a “limitation to academic freedom” - an oath to Biblical Literalism and a pledge of allegiance to Jesus.

  Texas Observer

When my son was in elementary school in a small town in Missouri, after having spent a few years in Seattle and the Davis, California, school systems, he would frequently come home frustrated with his "science" teacher. One of the proofs the man had given the class as an argument against claims of "evolutionists" was the proof that dinosaurs and men were on the earth at the same time: wagon tracks beside dinosaur tracks. Somewhere in Arizona, if memory serves me.

Unfortunately, scientists do have a bias against creationism, as Loving points out. And rightfully so. Science is biased towards empirical reality and testable hypotheses; creationism is biased towards the diktats of religion. It seems unfair - if not a little Orwellian - to ask professionals with scientific training to set aside the cornerstone, time-tested theory of modern biology in order to give pseudoscience a fair shake.

What if I wanted to offer a science degree and my school largely consisted of teaching credulous students that the earth is flat, the sun is really God’s flashlight, and - what the heck - gravity is a trick played on us by the Devil? Under McDonough’s logic, the coordinating board would check to make sure my campus had working smoke detectors and a good student-to-faculty ratio but not bother to see if what I taught made any sense whatsoever.

Still, I wouldn't rule out the State of Texas giving the ICR their accreditation for a science degree.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Scientific Ethics

Orphans keep getting the shaft in the name of science. Now we learn of a study conducted to determine the weight of nature vs. nurture on personality development. Identical twins were separated for adoption without the adopting parents being told there was a twin.

"When the families adopted these children, they were told that their child was already part of an ongoing child study. But of course, they neglected to tell them the key element of the study, which is that it was child development among twins raised in different homes," Bernstein says.

[...]

The study ended in 1980, and a year later, the state of New York began requiring adoption agencies to keep siblings together.

At that point, Bernstein says, Neubauer realized that public opinion would be so against the study that he decided not to publish it. The results of the study have been sealed until 2066 and given to an archive at Yale University.

  NPR

2066.

So that the “subjects” don’t find out they were part of the study, I suppose.

I wonder how the scientists get the consent of the agencies who give these kids up. Big dollars, I would have to assume. But where do the scientists get the big bucks? Who’s funding these studies? I've heard rumors about Yale and unsavory, secret experimentation on children in the past.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Who Are You Going to Believe?

Me or your lying eyes?

"Not actually linked to regional events."

That's the quote Bush's top science adviser made yesterday, saying there's no conclusive evidence that limiting the earth's temperature increase of two degrees Celsius would actually do anything.

His remarks run counter to that of most scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- which won the Nobel Peace Prize last week.

Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy John H. Marburger III said Thursday the target of limiting planetary heating to two degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit "is going to be a very difficult one to achieve and is not actually linked to regional events that affect people's lives."

  Raw Story

Two words: butterfly effect. Wise men throughout the ages have understood that everything is connected. But, the weather?? A “planetary” event doesn’t affect people’s lives?

While admitting that humans are producing too much carbon dioxide, he added, "you could have emerging disasters long before you get to two degrees... "

And with him and his administrative leaders at the helm, emerging disasters are well underway, so I have to agree with him on that one. Hey, why worry about global warming? We’re going to be nuked out of existence long before that does us in.

Under other circumstances – say if you were an Olympic God – this administration would be laughable.

Immigration, Levitation, and Homosexuality

Oh, come on. Use your imagination. I'm just trying to clean up all these draft posts.

I have never gotten much further on immigration issues than, why in the world is it legal or illegal to live anywhere? Why are people treated as government property? By birth, I am a Missourian - a somewhat arbitrary boundary thing, as all man-made boundaries tend to be. But, I've moved enough times to also have been a Californian, a Washingtonian, and now, a Texan (although they say here on Galveston Island that we are south of Texas, and further, if you are not born on the island, you are not to claim to be from Galveston - something that doesn't bother me, because I'm pretty sure this isn't even my home planet).

I was never illegal in any of those areas. Why should I be illegal if I move somewhere further away? I just think the whole idea is bizarre. Like having a license to be married. What's with that?

Anyway, The KC Blue Blog is calling for Missouri's governor to fire his chief of staff, Ed Martin, for this comment:

"I'll tell you what's available to every developer in order to figure out who's illegal. When there's a bunch of Mexicans out there, there's probably some of them who are not legal."

Racial profiling taken to its logical conclusion, I suppose.

And my choice for inane positions today comes from Rudy Giuliani.

Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said illegal immigration is not a crime.

[...]

"It's not a crime," Giuliani said Friday. "I know that's very hard for people to understand, but it's not a federal crime."

[...]

"I was U.S. attorney in the Southern district of New York," he said. "So believe me, I know this. In fact, when you throw an immigrant out of the country, it's not a criminal proceeding. It's a civil proceeding."

[...]

Illegal immigration shouldn't be a crime, either, Giuliani said: "No, it shouldn't be because the government wouldn't be able to prosecute it. We couldn't prosecute 12 million people.

[...]

He added: "My solution is close the border to illegal immigration."

  AP News

Close the border to illegal immigration? How do we do that, Rudy? Let me guess. Rudy has stock in fencing material.

And if it's not a crime, why is it called "illegal"? If it's true that it's not a crime, then maybe we need to start talking about this issue in different terms. Telling everybody that Mexican immigrants are illegal when it's not a crime for them to be here is hazing up the issue.

Oh, wait. Let's let Glenn Beck clear up that point.

[It's] not a crime. I know that's very hard for people to understand, but it's not a federal crime.

GLENN: It's a misdemeanor but if you've been nailed, it is a crime. If you've been nailed, ship back and come back, it is a crime.

  

"It's a misdemeanor, but if you've been nailed, it is a crime." Ahem. I think a misdemeanor is a crime to begin with.

Anyway, levitation and invisibility aren't just for Harry Potter.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing [the] pheneomenon known as the Casimir force so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

[...]

Prof Leonhardt leads one of four teams - three of them in Britain - to have put forward a theory in a peer-reviewed journal to achieve invisibility by making light waves flow around an object - just as a river flows undisturbed around a smooth rock.

  UK Telegraph

And speaking of marriage...

With liberty and justice....

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Zeno, Kid's Companion

You knew it was coming. And, hey, at an eventual target price of $200-$300, it's cheaper than another kid.

"It's a representation of robotics as a character animation medium, one that is intelligent," [creator David] Hanson beams. "It sees you and recognizes your face. It learns your name and can build a relationship with you."

  Yahoo

And, taken in context with the recent NY Times article about future computer programmers creating virtual ancestors, I think you can begin to see my point: some of you may not be real. And again, this could explain Washington.

And this could keep those GOP pedophiles out of trouble with the law, too, couldn't it? At least until we get to I Robot.

Trust Us

Humberto caught sight of something interesting off to his right, puffed up to hurricane force and headed east. So, my internet connection is still up....

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found "reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top "innovative technologies."

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

  AP

Polticial Science

Something everybody knows by virtue of simple observation has been tested with scientific equipment.

Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.

[...]

Intrigued by these correlations, New York University political scientist David Amodio and colleagues decided to find out if the brains of liberals and conservatives reacted differently to the same stimuli.

[...]

Using electroencephalographs, which measure neuronal impulses, the researchers examined activity in a part of the brain -- the anterior cingulate cortex -- that is strongly linked with the self-regulatory process of conflict monitoring.

The match-up was unmistakable: respondents who had described themselves as liberals showed "significantly greater conflict-related neural activity" when the hypothetical situation called for an unscheduled break in routine.

Conservatives, however, were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits "despite signals that this ... should be changed."

  Yahoo

Bingo.

"It hasn't gone like we hoped? Change approach? Hell, no. Surge. We need to surge."

Actually, because complexity and ambiguity in our world are facing us in spades and with intensity, and because change is the natural order of things with the rate of change seemingly increasing, what this study implies is that Liberals will inherit the earth.

If Conservatives don't destroy it first.

Hey, maybe that's why they're going full speed ahead with the war plans: "I'd rather destroy it than see you get it." "If I can't have her, nobody can."

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

You May Not Even Be Real

This could explain a lot.

[T]echnological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, [and] advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. [Nick] Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable.

  Read more

Science Break

I will let you know right away that this wasn't an American study, although it could easily have been, so you don't feel that we're so alone. This came out of Germany.

When presented with a tube containing food or a toy, two-and-a-half-year-olds followed an experimenter's example to retrieve the prize, while the apes put all their energy towards simply biting or breaking the tube.

Maybe I've forgotten all my science experimentation points, but...doesn't biting and breaking the tube count as getting at the food or toy inside? (And why would an ape be interested in getting to a toy?)

As part of one of the social learning tasks, the researchers demonstrated how to pop open a plastic tube to retrieve the food or toy inside. The children watched and copied the researcher; the apes attempted to break the tube or pull it apart with their teeth.

Did somebody explain to them the importance of keeping the tube intact? I guess they had reason to think they could get into it that way, too. Perhaps, while the children were copying other humans, the apes were copying the other apes.

All of the subjects performed equally well in terms of the physical cognitive management of space, and in understanding concepts such as quantities and causality. However, the children were correct in three out of four of the social learning tests, while the two ape species were correct only one out of three times.

Now, granted, I don't know what those tests actually were, but considering the rest of the story (particularly the fact that they used toys inside the tubes), I'm going to hazard a guess that the "social learning tests" may have been set up based on human social activity.

According to the researchers, the results of the study support the theory that human social skills give humans an evolutionary edge. A second theory argues that humans differ in skill levels from apes as a result of being generally more intelligent.

Maybe the experiment was actually better laid out, had more detail, and conclusions were based on the evidence, but not from this report can we come to those conclusions. By this report, all we learned was that humans are better at human social skills than apes. Imagine that.

It's Not Friday Yet

A 20-year government effort to restore the population of an endangered native trout in Colorado has made little progress because biologists have been stocking some of the waterways with the wrong fish, a new study says.

  Yahoo

D'oh!

The three-year study, led by University of Colorado researchers and published online in Molecular Ecology on Aug. 28, said that five of the nine populations believed to be descendants of the endangered trout were actually the more common Colorado River cutthroat trout, which look similar.

Don't say it.

Politics Break

Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.

[...]

For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases.

[...]

EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

[...]

Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.

  AP

"We shall see," said Grandpa. "We shall see."

Court Orders Bush Administration to Publish Climate Data

A federal judge ordered the Bush administration to issue two scientific reports on global warming, siding with environmentalists who sued the White House for failing to produce the documents.

[...]

The judge set a May 31 deadline to produce a national assessment containing the most recent scientific data on global warming and its projected effects on the country's environment, economy and public health. The government is required to complete a national assessment every four years, the judge ruled.

The last one was issued by the Clinton administration in 2000.

  Yahoo

Of course, we've already seen that the Bush Administration is not above ordering government scientists to fudge data. So getting the reports isn't the same as getting the truth.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Your Sunday Sermon

I keep thinking I'll read that doozie of a pre-vacation recess speech of the Little Prince's and parse it. But the further away it gets, the less interest I have. Something I read this morning is far more fascinating to me, so I'm going to share that. Maybe the speech will come later.

Science break...

As you know, a spinning disc in a computer records information in bits and bytes as they arrive, and spinning, files them scattered around the disc (hence the "defrag" function to collate bits when things slow down).

"What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword.....

[...]

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You "evoke" the desired records by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection of "microwave" and "headache" and you find 20 articles you never suspected existed. [...] If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events."

[-- Jacques Vallee]

  Rigorous Intuition

Jeff uses that quote to explain conspiracy theorizing:

There are conspiracies, and mysteries, and horrors. But if you feel like you're in a Thomas Pynchon novel, then congratulations: you wrote it.

[...]

Some things - some stories, places, and names - are simply strange attractors. Invoking them is to create a gravity well, a distortion of reality, in which everything else seems to run towards them.

Possibly. But what this idea very nicely explains to me is what people know as answered prayer and coincidence - "That's the third time today that name has come up." "I was just wondering about that this morning, and here it shows up this afternoon." "I prayed for a week about it, and my prayer has been answered." That kind of thing.

The experience of coincidental events has become so commonplace for me that it's no longer surprising or weird, but the mechanism behind it has remained mysterious. I've been certain for some time that there really is no such thing as coincidence - that there is some force controlling and creating synchronicity, but I only had vague theories and ideas about what it might be or how it might work.

An idea that has seemed most likely to me is that when you think about something which then happens or appears shortly, it's because events and objects have an energy field that extends beyond them and is stronger the nearer to the object or event you are. As that energy field approaches you - or vice versa - you become aware of it. Some people are more sensitive or able to pick up on it than others, and so they become aware of the event sooner, at the leading edge of the energy field. But that doesn't explain how multiple seemingly random but related things happen within a short period of time.

I don't know what the latest scientific ideas about this are, but I'm liking the computer storage and retrieval analogy. I know of someone who calls coincidences "cosmic winks". Maybe I will start calling them "defrag moments".

Now, watch for them. Or should I say, create them.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

More Cross-Species Research

If you suffer from blindness related to certain conditions, you may soon be in luck - you could have fish cell injections.

I have this recurring idea about the circles and cycles of life and the ring of infinity wherein our future meets a point where it is also our past. Perhaps something cataclysmic happens periodically, and the reset button is pushed on the earth, in essence. The remaining few humans are reduced to savage survival status and have to start all over. Millenia later, they reach the point where they have our level of technology, and off they go, as humans do, into areas of experimentation with things they know little or nothing about, and eventually wind up at the same ending/starting place. Reset.

These stories of cross-species experimentation always make me think of the stories about (mythological) creatures that were half man, half beast. How do stories get remembered and told and retold and passed down over the ages if they come through the minds of people who have had no institutions of learning for thousands of years? Maybe they become myths for future generations.

Couch Potato Heaven

The ultimate remote control may soon be available.