Oh how Nature can humble

I am a child of the internet usually with my mind awed by the pace with which the Information Age has unfurled. I am truly amazed by the social, political, economic and scientific change that has happened within the lifespans of even my parents. But as a believer in God I can say that Nature awes me even more than the creations of humankind. Humankind included…I recently ran across an article that floored me with this stunning and humbling conclusion: all of the world’s computing power matches the computations per second of just ONE human brain. We are awash in a world on the verge of coming alive with creations of our own making yet it still does not match eons of evolution.

From Ars Technica:

Lest we get too enamored with our technological prowess, however, the authors make some comparisons with biology. “To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that humankind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second,” they write.

The Budget and NASA

The White House released its latest budget and, as expected, it took an ax to funding for NASA. As a space exploration enthusiast this is really disappointing. As a kid, I grew up in a state of unalloyed awe for the scientists/adventurers that sat astride thousands of pounds of fuel in order to breach the heavens and expand the scope of human knowledge. Phil Plait of the blog Bad Astronomy has an informative overview on what this means:

Overall? “Its budget overall drops from $1.5 billion to $1.2, a very deep cut that doesn’t just threaten but destroys near-future Mars exploration as well as future big grand missions to the outer planets in the tradition of Voyager, Cassini, and others.” On Mars exploration: “The President’s request for just Mars exploration is $361 million, a crippling $226M drop in funding over the FY12 estimate, a 38.5% cut.”

But, it is not all bad news. For instance, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST):

JWST is getting a large $109M (21%) increase as it gets nearer to completion.

Warning signs

Rebecca Rosen over at The Atlantic presents a graphic which illustrates the climate crisis in worrying detail:

More from Rosen’s article:

Higher temperatures today are the result of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. In 1880, when the study’s temperature record-keeping begins, the concentration of carbon dioxide was 285 parts per million. Today it is more than 390 parts per million and rapidly increasing. Many top climate scientists, including NASA’s James Hansen, have argued that a level not exceeding 350 parts per million is necessary “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.”

The bold was added by me for emphasis as I believe that Mr. Hansen’s words are a succinctly stated warning for us all.

Grappling with consciousness

Consciousness is one of the great philosophical mysteries that continues to befuddle modern inquiry. As scientists grapple with this mystery there are some intriguing clues from the application of anesthesia. From New Scientist:

But is it even realistic to expect to find a discrete site or sites acting as the mind’s “light switch”? Not according to a leading theory of consciousness that has gained ground in the past decade, which states that consciousness is a more widely distributed phenomenon. In this “global workspace” theory, incoming sensory information is first processed locally in separate brain regions without us being aware of it. We only become conscious of the experience if these signals are broadcast to a network of neurons spread through the brain, which then start firing in synchrony.

The idea has recently gained support from recordings of the brain’s electrical activity using electroencephalograph (EEG) sensors on the scalp, as people are given anaesthesia. This has shown that as consciousness fades there is a loss of synchrony between different areas of the cortex – the outermost layer of the brain important in attention, awareness, thought and memory.

A Metric US

Why isn’t the US on the metric system? I have wondered about this:

American metric advocates encountered stiff opposition in the ’70s and ’80s. Labor unions worried that workers would be unable to learn a new system. Businesses protested that redesigning machines and products to metric standards would be costly. States objected to the expense of replacing road signs and revising laws. And average citizens argued that change was unnecessary and said the metric system–with its multiples of 10, instead of the more intuitive halves and quarters of English measures–was not compatible with human experience. In contrast, there was no natural constituency for the pro-metric cause.

There’s hope in Space

Back in October 2008 when President Obama outlined the components of his space policy I was rather disappointed. What about Mars? What will replace the Space Shuttle? And the biggest concern was a worrying approach that viewed a reliance on private enterprise as a necessity. But if you are watching initiative likes the SpaceX prize which eventually led to what will soon be the first widely available space tourism opportunities with Virgin Galactic and companies like Moon Express which hopes to begin some type of lunar operations by 2016, you know that there may be hope in some kind of public research-private implementation scheme with respect to space exploration.

From the LA Times:

Most people don’t take it literally when they’re told to shoot for the moon — but thinking small isn’t Naveen Jain’s way. The 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur is a co-founder of Moon Express Inc., one of several companies in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, in which privately funded teams will try to put robots on the moon by 2016.

Jain’s plans don’t end at reaching the moon’s surface. MoonEx, as his company is also known, plans to make billions mining the moon for precious resources. It also hopes to let customers send messages and materials to the moon.

The never-ending negotiations

This editorial cartoon made me smile and nod because it is so true. Climate change negotiators left Durban while patting themselves on the back for their ‘historic achievement.’ If only such an historic achievement were up to the historic challenge that the human species faces in climate change. The world’s nations have agreed to more flapping of the gums while consigning us all to an avoidable fate. May future generations have mercy on us.

Disappointment in Durban

The negotiations seem to be at an impasse in Durban over a new climate change accord. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has stated that a replacement for the Kyoto Accord which expires next year “may be out of reach” and now the chances of an extension of even the Kyoto Accord may be dwindling. This is from The Guardian:

But the global north, responsible for 75% of accumulated CO2 emissions, has made far less substantial pledges than the south, which is least responsible for climate change but whose people are the most at risk. It’s unlikely that India will agree to binding commitments. The issue is a potential deal-breaker.

The EU has linked it to another hypersensitive issue on which Durban could founder, the Kyoto protocol. This imposed a modest 5% emissions cut on the north. Despite some flaws, including an over-reliance on markets, Kyoto differentiates between the north and south’s responsibility for climate change and mandates that the north repay its climate debt.

But Kyoto’s effective, early phase, called “first commitment period”, ends next year. A second period must be negotiated if Kyoto is to survive. Russia, Japan and Canada are vehemently opposed to such an extension, and the US seems to be working quietly to kill Kyoto, which it never ratified.

And that very thin string that holds the sword of Damocles over the world unravels even more…

A chimpanzee >> human blood transfusion?

Yesterday at work I shared an interesting tidbit with a coworker concerning the remarkable genetic closeness between chimpanzees and humans. That difference is around 1% overall and our similarity is so much that we could actually receive a blood transfusion from a chimpanzee assuming a match for blood type. No one believed me and I quickly acquiesced to the doubts because I had only read it in a science article with no deeper research on the matter. Tonight I went a bit further in my reading and came across an interview with the acclaimed primatologist Jane Goodall which apparently confirms the initial factoid. Goodall is one of the world’s foremost experts on primates so I figured she was a good source for fact-checking.

And I am freshly awed. Nature never ceases to amaze.

Intellect of the Depths

A recent article in Orion Magazine excited me to no end! Most people know of SETI or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence but what if we happen to find another intelligence right here on Earth? Scientists are beginning to consider the common but varied octopus as one such possibility.

Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.

The octopus is one very interesting creature, as an example:

The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. “It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

Perhaps we need a SITI too? A Search for Intraterrestrial Intelligence…does that make sense?

Considering life, quantum mechanically

What little I am able to comprehend and just wrap my mind around concerning quantum physics is so odd and interesting. And it is increasingly true that the implications for current theories on life and consciousness are equally interesting. This is particularly true with respect to current theories on consciousness such as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s ORCH-OR. But at a simpler and more fundamental level even consider our ability to smell as is discussed in a recent issue of New Scientist:

…Take smell, Brookes’s area of interest. For decades, the line has been that a chemical’s scent is determined by molecular shape. Olfactory receptors in the nose are like locks opened only with the right key; when that key docks, it triggers nerve signals that the brain interprets as a particular smell.

Is that plausible? We have around 400 differently shaped smell receptors, but can recognise around 100,000 smells, implying some nifty computation to combine signals from different receptors and process them into distinct smells. Then again, that’s just the sort of thing our brains are good at. A more damning criticism is that some chemicals smell similar but look very different, while others have the same shape but smell different. The organic compounds vanillin and isovanillin, for example, smell differently but are two similarly shaped arrangements of the same molecule.

Design + Function=An easier read

A dyslexic Dutch graphic designer, Christian Boer, has created a new font which helps others who struggle with the disorder to read with less difficulty. The font called Dyslexie vaguely brings to mind a more sophisticated sister font to Comic Sans. This makes my inner font geek screech with glee.

The consequences of complacency

Some stiff medicine is needed when it comes to the general public’s attitude toward the threat of climate change here in America. And UC Berkeley Scientist Dr. John Harte (JH) seems more than happy to administer it. Here in an interview with Forbes’ Michael Charles Tobias (MT) he pushes back against the unfortunate complacency:

MT: Climate has varied throughout Earth’s history as a result of natural processes — why should we be inordinately concerned about the current warming that our species is currently unleashing/triggering/producing?

JH: This enormous irony, if you will, apparently confuses many of those who deny the findings of climate science or, for other reasons, argue for complacency. First of all, some deniers ask “what’s the big deal with 5 or 10 degrees of warming? We see such changes daily. “

MT: Right, floods in Manhattan, a drought across half the U.S. this Summer; temperatures in Texas exceeding three digits week after week after week. Some people are simply packing their bags and moving to Oregon, or wherever they are betting it’s going to be cooler.

JH: Well, one way to think about that is to note that when earth’s average temperature was just ten degrees cooler in the last ice age, a 300-foot thick ice sheet covered much of North America and Europe!

MT: OK? Go on?

JH: Other deniers argue that Earth has changed that much in the past and life survived. True, but previously, Earth warmed much more slowly than it is now, giving animals and plants many millennia to adapt or migrate through wilderness — wilderness undisturbed by exploding populations of people who now occupy much of the planet’s former natural habitats.

Various examples of genius

Is genius the product of discipline as much as it is innate talent? The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell explores why people commonly associate precociousness with genius. He begins with the story of Ben Fountain and a true leap of faith…and chance:

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 a.m. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.

But what will they name it?

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta on July 15 and one discovery is truly staggering. Photographs from Dawn apparently show the second highest mountain in the solar system:

“Like Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury, Vesta has ancient basaltic lava flows on the surface and a large iron core … The south polar mountain is larger than the big island of Hawaii, the largest mountain on Earth, as measured from the ocean floor. It is almost as high as the highest mountain in the solar system, the shield volcano Olympus Mons on Mars.”

Psilocybin, for a better you

I imagined the title of this post as the tagline in an imaginary ad for psilocybin. Friends have told me of their transcendent experiences under the influence of shrooms. Science seems to be committed to catching up with the experiences of many through the millenia. According to researchers at Johns Hopkins magic mushrooms may have a permanently beneficial experience on an individual’s personality.

People who had mystic experiences while taking the mushrooms were more likely to show increases in a personality trait dubbed “openness,” which is related to creativity, artistic appreciation and curiosity, according to the study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The change was still in place a year later, suggesting a long-term effect.

The Animal Connection

Every pet owner already knows this but it bears reminding: Our relationship with out pets as members of the family is one of the most human of traits. And now scientific research is lending credence to it as Dave Munger writing in SEED magazine discovers:

Shipman calls this close bond with animals the “animal connection,” and says it unites all the other human traits. Unlike other animals, who can only communicate via a limited set of signals, humans have languages capable of expressing complex concepts—and we share our language with our pets, treating them as if they understand our words (even though in many, if not most cases, they do not!). While some animals such as chimpanzees do make and use tools, no other animal utilizes so many tools in such complex and varied ways as humans do. We even use animals themselves as tools—from rodent bomb-sniffers to carrier pigeons to police dogs. In nearly every case where humans work with animals, they form close bonds. Animal abusers like the infamous NFL quarterback Michael Vick are treated with scorn seldom heaped on criminals who prey on human victims.

A. Sediba

We may be one step closer to completing the map of human evolution. Scientists recently announced the discovery of fossils with physical characteristics midway between homo sapiens (modern humans) and apes. A story like this that unites every single human being on the planet really excited me. The two million year old fossil find is called Australopithecus Sideba and was found northeast of Johannesburg, South Africa within an area that has been the site of several other important findings related to human evolution.

From the Associated Press:

“It’s as if evolution is caught in one vital moment, a stop-action snapshot of evolution in action,” said Richard Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution. He was not among the team, led by South African scientists, whose research was published online Thursday in the journal Science.

Scientists have long considered the Australopithecus family, which includes the famous fossil Lucy, to be a primitive candidate for a human ancestor. The new research establishes a creature that combines features of both groups.

The complexities of non-monogamous relationships

Having problems understanding the vagaries of human relationships and sexuality? There’s a chart for that. The online sex & relationship magazine Nerve directs our attention to the chart below covering (the many many types) of non-monogamous relationships.

The chart was created by Franklin Veaux.

A finely tuned future

Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi, writing in SEED magazine, has an interesting theory on one potential evolutionary path for humanity. It involves something he calls neuronal recycling, and if we need examples of this we need only look into our species’ history:

Nevertheless, there is a very good reason to be optimistic that the next stage of human will come via the form of adaptive harnessing, rather than direct technological enhancement: It has already happened.

We have already been transformed via harnessing beyond what we once were. We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.

In this transition from Human 1.0 to 2.0, we didn’t directly do the harnessing. Rather, it was an emergent, evolutionary property of our behavior, our nascent culture, that bent and shaped writing to be right for our visual system, speech just so for our auditory system, and music a match for our auditory and evocative mechanisms.

And culture’s trick? It was to shape these artifacts to look and sound like things from our natural environment, just what our sensory systems evolved to expertly accommodate. There are characteristic sorts of contour conglomerations occurring among opaque objects strewn about in three dimensions (like our natural Earthly habitats), and writing systems have come to employ many of these naturally common conglomerations rather than the naturally uncommon ones. Sounds in nature, in particular among the solid objects that are most responsible for meaningful environmental auditory stimuli, follow signature patterns, and speech also follows these patterns, both in its fundamental phoneme building blocks and in how phonemes combine into morphemes and words. And we humans, when we move and behave, make sounds having a characteristic animalistic signature, something we surely have specialized auditory mechanisms for sensing and processing; music is replete with these characteristic sonic signatures of animal movements, harnessing our auditory mechanisms that evolved for recognizing the actions of other large mobile creatures like ourselves.