Category Archives: science

LEDs in Contact Lenses? Cool!

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Technology continues to blur the line between our bodies and helpful gadgets.  CNET reports that the University of Washington is experimenting with embedding LEDs into contact lenses, a step in the direction of creating vision correcting contact lenses.  

In his powerful book “The Singularity is Near”, Ray Kurzweil notes how powerfully the technologies involved with Nanotechnology, Robotics, and Genetics will enhance our understanding of the way our human attributes work to create  awareness, intelligence, and consciousness. 

Life Sentence: Immortality

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Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel are not crackpots.  

Kurzweil, among other things, was a major pioneer in speech recognition software and electronic musical instruments, from which he made a fortune.   Kurzweil still works in the music field on SONY projects, but his passion is … immortality, and he’s working hard towards that end.

Thiel has made a king’s fortune in online projects like EBAY and PayPal, but he’s got more innovative things up his sleeve.   Like Kurzweil, Theil’s looking to help fund the holy grail of humanity – immortality.

Even a few decades ago reasonable people would have considered much of the talk about a technological singularity and massive superintelligent computers to be fanciful at best and insanity at worst, but the inexorable march of technology is bringing us to within about a decade – probably two at the most – of human quality artificial intelligence.   The processing power of the human brain will be reached soon, and unless there is something more to our human intellect than one can reasonably assume we are going to be chatting intelligently with our computers fairly soon.  After that milestone is reached it is likely that it won’t be long before “recursive self improvement” by these intelligent computers will create artificial intelligences far superior to our current human intellects.  Not to worry though, because it also appears likely that improvements in medicine, brain research, and nanotechnology will allow us to enhance our bodies and intellects such that we’ll live much longer and be much smarter.

Kurzweil, in the book “The Singularity is Near”, argues that the historical exponential growth of technology shows no signs of slowing down – in fact he’s convinced the growth is speeding up.   At the current rates of increase we’ll see the same improvements over the next decades that we have seen in the past hundred years.  For Kurzweil these improvements will lead to a utopian future of no poverty, massively improved intellects, and eventually immortality as we download our brains into machines.

Sounds cool to me Ray, I’m IN!

Conde Nast on Kurzweil

More at kurzweilai.net

23andMe and Me

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I just ordered up my Genome at 23andme.com    They’ll send the kit over the next few days, I’ll swab my saliva and send it back, and they’ll analyze the sample.  Then I’ll be able to see a list showing most of my genome. every single nucleotide pair of mine.  Obviously reading that report could get kind of boring …. “HOLY Crap, there’s *another* GATC sequence!”  Which is why 23andMe has a lot of cool online information and tools to graph and understand your relationships to your genome, your ancestry, and more.   It’s staggering that only a few years after cracking this holy grail of biology it’s available to everybody.   “The Language of God” for more about the philosophy of one of the key players in the quest for the human Genome.  

 Yes,  $999 is a lot of pizza and beer, but OMG how could I not do this?   I’ll report more here as I learn more about my genes. 

Genomes, Genomes! Step right up and get yaarrrr Genomes! Only $999

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It is *so cool* to be around to see some of the most sweeping changes in human history unfold right before our eyes.    www.23andme.com, the new service that will provide you with your complete genetic blueprint,  brings the potential for a sea change in the way humans will view our relationship to each other and to our own biology and chemistry.  

This company is brought to us thanks to the amazing work of the Genome Project, which fully documented a complete human DNA record.   23andme allows all of us to get a copy of our own genome – at a fraction of the cost for the first set of DNA.

 Hopefully this will also help us along the path to a better philosophical and emotional relationship to the world that spawned all of us from physical and evolutionary processes that we continue to grasp in more fascinating detail.

www.23andMe is also intriguing as it’s the brainchild of  Google founder Sergy Brin’s wife and early Google employee Anne.    One of the exciting things about Google is that the founders and early employees are not only brilliant – they are also young and enthusiastic technological visionaries who, unlike some of their predecessors like Tesla, have *tons* of money to invest in these visionary technological dreams.     

Will I be signing up for a copy?   Maybe, but even though $999 is an amazing deal it’s a lot of pizzas, so I’m going to wait for the first …. ummm … “Genome sale”.

Nanotube Radio Tunes In

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Wow.   Nanotube researchers have created a microscopic, functional radio.  Science Daily reports.   I had no idea how far this research has progressed and it seems like it won’t be long before we see a lot of practical applications for this amazing technology.   Initially this will probably be in commercial applications like phones and computers, but nanotechnology, combined with conscious computing, is likely to lie at the heart of the most provocative changes humankind will ever see – where technology will enhance our feeble human capabilities in many ways.    It’s going to be amazing, and it’s already starting to happen.

Driving under the influence of computers

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 The DARPA autonomous vehicle competion is on today in California.   It’s sponsored by the US military’s advanced technology division and seeks to create vehicles that can navigate without human intervention.  

The stakes are high in this competition where the top vehicles will take home millions in prize money – presumably for their university research.

These vehicles would be remarkable enough if they simply roamed through the desert as in past competitions, but this year the DARPA challenge is taking place in an urban environment, where fifty regular cars with human drivers will be zigging and zagging and presenting the autonomous vehicles with the advanced challenges of driving in a city.

Ashlee at The Register is liveblogging the event, though she seems pretty grumpy from the lack of coffee.   C’mon Ashlee, the military only has a $500,000,000,000 budget – and you want free coffee?

An autonomous ground vehicle is a vehicle that navigates and drives entirely on its own with no human driver and no remote control. Through the use of various sensors and positioning systems, the vehicle determines all the characteristics of its environment required to enable it to carry out the task it has been assigned

The Illusion of Will. Prisoners of the synapse?

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This morning I stumbled on a reference to a book by Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner called “The Illusion of Conscious Will” which is one of those interesing books I’d like to read but probably won’t.    My coffee pal Roy had clued me in to this research some time aog, and the key point is available online via reviews and such, and it is simply this:

We don’t have conscious will.    Things happen to us, and we process them using our conscious mind, but we don’t *make them happen*.

Now, at first glance this deterministic view seems absurd.    Of course, one might say, I control my actions.    But determinist psychology folks point out that it’s increasingly clear that our actions are *preceded* by brain activity and events that would suggest – I think I’m getting this right – that by the time we are doing “conscious processing” about the thing we are doing, we are already engaged in the activity.   ie the “cause” of our actions comes before the conscious processing period.     From a nice review of Wegner’s book I understand he thinks we confuse this “after the fact” processing with “control”.

Although I am pretty much a determinist I am also uncomfortable with the idea that we are sort of passive players in a predetermined universal play.    The “gut test” says we control our actions and decide what to do.  

I think my ongoing hypothesis about this will be  similar to my idea that consciousness is a conversation between different parts of our brain.  These conversations, many of which are taking place during waking hours and some during sleep, allow us to process information very creatively and act on mental models of the world around us.   It seems we might not have control over our actions 0.1 seconds before them, but that we might have control via processes that happen seconds before as our brain runs through various scenarios.     Now, I think Wegner would say – correctly – that for any given conscious thought you can show there is a preceding electrochemical activity (synapse firing and such) that is not reasonably defined as conscious.  

However what if that initial spark of reflection is unconscious but then leads to a back and forth conscious conversation within your mind that in turn leads to the action. Would that be free will?

[my brain answers –   dude, no way, you have no free will.   Now, stop blogging obscurities and pass the damn M&Ms!]

Science on a Sphere

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Wow, NOAA has a great educational tool – a large spherical display representing earth, using computers and projectors to animate the display.  It is called Science on a Sphere.

Here’s a list of locations that have this.

It looks like a schools could build one of these for themselves, though I’m not clear any have done it and not clear on copyright issues – they say this is not an open source project.   It appears the cost would be in the neighborhood of 5-10,000 for the hardware consisting of 4 projectors and 5? computers, but I think the main challenge for schools would be the room.   Many schools don’t have a “spare room” they could easily dedicate to this project and it appears it’s complicated enough that it would be difficult to put up and take down for each lesson.

But what a great concept!   A few years ago we visited the Delorme world HQ back east and they had a  scale model of earth that was 3 stories high and rotated.   But the NOAA Science on a Sphere is better because you could project data and topography and vary the lessons.

Of course as a cheap alternative teachers should (MUST!) get “Google Earth” to all the students they have.    Google earth is arguably the best cheap visualization tool ever to hit geography and if you have not seen it get it now – it’s free and fantastic.   

New telescope will help with search for ET

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Thanks to some megabucks from Microsoft founder Paul Allen there’s a new telescope on the block and it will soon be bigger and better at spotting aliens than anything to date.   Here is the BBC story.

I would argue that alien life is almost a certainty, but *finding it* is not at all certain since the distances to other systems are so great that even if there is intelligent life on planets of our “next door neighbor” star, Proxima Centauri, and even if they are beaming some TV shows or data in our direction, it would take about 4.5 years for us to get the signal and another 4.5 to send one back.   Now THAT is lag time in a conversation.   

Think how hard it would be to buy and sell stuff with alien dudes that were, say, 50 light years distant.  The ad would have to read “If you act right NOW on our special offer, you might get it just before you DIE of old age.  Only $9.95 and supplies are limited”.

But if the new scope finds more life perhaps they will have invented technologies we can only dream of, or more likely and hopefully they’ll have intelligence extending capabilities that we could copy.    Kurzweil’s singularity promises immortality, but it’s best not to hold your breath on that one quite yet.

Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and IPCC

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Congratulations – sort of – to Al Gore and the IPCC for the Nobel Peace Prize.   I’m somewhat confused because it seems to me their efforts would not fall under the general category of promoting “Peace”.    AP story about Al Gore and IPCC Peace Prize is here.  More importantly people should be concerned that our new global focus on very expensive and problematic climate change science will distract us from more pressing problems.   Here’s what I just wrote to the Nobel Prize Committee – their website even promises I’ll get a response. 

As much as I respect Al Gore and the IPCC I worry that our new global focus on Climate Change will distract us from the more pressing problems of poverty, health, and violent conflict.   Was this possibility considered by the awards committee?

Climate change is the best current example of how humans process information, problems, and solutions in irrational ways.    Generally people note that global warming is happening (true) and that warming is likely the result of human activity (probably true – IPCC concludes over 90% likely).    It’s also reasonable to assume that warming will lead to mostly undesirable changes.   HOWEVER, it does not follow from these truths that we should make Global Warming the top priority.  In fact due to the expense and difficulties involved a clear mind will conclude that we should implement cheap changes but forego the expensive changes in favor of devoting those resources to *current* catastrophic global conditions – generally these relate to poverty and health conditions in the developing world, but would also probably include work to alleviate the appalling conditions found in many American and European big city neighborhoods.

Below is a link to a video of Bjorn Lomborg at TED Conference on Global Solution Priorities.   In my opinion he’s the clearest thinker out there – a contrast to people who are so poisoned by “political thinking” and “advocacy thinking” that they can’t see the facts from their causes.    I think a good test of whether you are clear thinking about a topic is to make the opposition case effectively enough that people can’t tell your bias.    Most topics have complex sets of facts and no easy answers – everybody should keep that in mind.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtbn9zBfJSs

Hey – Al Gore’s office looks a lot like mine, but with bigger monitors.    I like him, but don’t agree with him that GW is the big problem facing us.

There’s a LOT MORE about this over at Max’s blog.