cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/2012/statisticala.jpg

Or so you’d think they’re implying from this quote from the blurb at phys.org: For the first time, researchers have been able to build a consensus between different regional climate models using spatial statistics.

What say, we take time out from fuming about whether past predictions are even predictions and what people intended back then.

Look at the phys.org site, and maybe even find other sites, that have data more like something we could start tracking, like we were doing with the JAXA satellite. How is this different from other kinds of predictions? Have there been other predictions?

Put your thoughts on this topic, and your links to predictions (preferably in a nicely crafted post), in the comments section! Citizen Science is part of Science 2.0.

“…We wanted to design an optimal catalyst with high activity and low costs that could generate hydrogen as a high-density, clean energy source,”…”We needed to create high, stable activity by combining one non-noble element that binds hydrogen too weakly with another that binds too strongly,”…”The result becomes this well-balanced Goldilocks compound—just right.”…The scientists expected the applied nitrogen to modify the structure of the nickel-molybdenum, producing discrete, sphere-like nanoparticles. But they discovered something else….” Full Slice

“The same freezing which is responsible for transforming liquids into glasses can help to predict some patterns observed in prime numbers, according to a team of scientists…”One of important questions about the Riemann Zeta function relates to determining how large the highest of the peaks in the landscape are. In our paper we have argued that, unexpectedly, answering that question is related to the problem of characterizing the nature of the freezing transition in certain complex materials in physics, such as glasses.”…” Full Slice

“Mice with a form of dementia have had the condition reversed by a process that involves ‘rebooting’ brain cells otherwise destined to die.

The process that kills the cells could be common to all dementias, so blocking it in the same way might hold promise for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease – although more research is needed to explore this further….” Full Slice

“A basic equation of electricity and magnetism is wrong, one scientist claims. The classic formula for the force exerted by electric and magnetic fields—the so-called Lorentz force—clashes with Einstein’s special theory of relativity, says Masud Mansuripur, an electrical engineer at the University of Arizona in Tucson.“

Move the scroll bar left or right - it’s fantastic.

“Where there’s greatest ground water storage is in northern Africa, in the large sedimentary basins, in Libya, Algeria and Chad,” she said.”

I notice that there is also a lot of water in the areas currently being mined for and/or explored for uranium: northern Niger and NE Mali.

“…”Breast cancer is not one disease, but 10 different diseases,”…”Our results will pave the way for doctors in the future to diagnose the type of breast cancer a woman has, the types of drugs that will work and those that won’t, in a much more precise way than is currently possible.”…” Full Slice

“…researchers compiled ice and sedimentary core samples collected from dozens of locations around the world, and found evidence that while changes in Earth’s orbit may have touched off a warming trend, increases in CO2 played a far more important role in pushing the planet out of the ice age.

“Orbital changes are the pacemaker. They’re the trigger, but they don’t get you too far,”…Most scientists now believe…that the first domino wasn’t an increase in greenhouse gases, but a gradual change in Earth’s orbit. That orbital change resulted in more sunlight hitting the northern hemisphere. As the ice sheets over North America and Europe melted, millions of gallons of fresh water flooded into the North Atlantic and disruped the cyclical flow of ocean currents…”…if you turn the conveyor belt off, it’s going to warm the south because you’re no longer stealing that heat away. Warming the southern hemisphere, in turn, shifts the winds and melts back sea ice that had formed a cap, trapping carbon in the deep ocean.”…” Full Slice

“International scientists have shown that a dramatic sea-level rise occurred at the onset of the first warm period of the last deglaciation, known as the Bølling warming, approximately 14,600 years ago. This event, referred to as Melt-Water Pulse 1A (MWP-1A), corresponds to a rapid collapse of massive ice sheets 14,600 years ago and resulted in global sea-level rise of ~14 m….” Full Slice

“The ranking of a monkey within her social environment and the stress accompanying that status dramatically alters the expression of nearly 1,000 genes, a new scientific study reports. The research is the first to demonstrate a link between social status and genetic regulation in primates on a genome-wide scale, revealing a strong, plastic link between social environment and biology.

In a comparison of high-ranking rhesus macaque females with their low-ranking companions, researchers discovered significant differences in the expression of genes involved in the immune response and other functions. When a female’s rank improved, her gene expression also changed within a few weeks, suggesting that social forces can rapidly influence genetic regulation….” Full Slice

I read the following:

“The impression of the family is that the unknown third party was a member of some agency specializing in the dark arts of the secret services, or evidence has been removed post-mortem by experts in the dark arts,”

and I wondered “What if there were no spooks?”  Would we all be dead or are these people deluded that what they do matters?  Full Slice

Here is a pic of the whale skeleton hanging at the Highline College MaST center.

Here is a nice little article with some pictures of the skeleton being moved.

When Do Fish Have Names?

Thought in the Technium

HoB Research Institute Videochat Report #1

Copyright 2012 Steven Dean Calahan

HoB Research Institute Videochat 2011.11.25

Factors Participant: Cahn, Calahan, Guyll, Kemper, Osenbaugh, Snow

Factors Correspondant: Flanagan, Joellenbeck

Version 0.1.1

DOI: (TBD)

WHEN DO FISH HAVE NAMES?

Imagine that you give a family dinner party, and Kim, one of your relatives, brings her friend Pat, who lives in another country and speaks only a few words of the prevailing language. After much jollity and some awkwardness due to Pat’s technical language deficiencies, she attracts everybody’s attention by earnestly asking a seemingly profound, or perhaps trivial question: “when do fish have names?”. Once the good-natured laughter dies down, further communication reveals that Pat is really asking what kind of fish had been cooked for the meal and was trying to ask “what is the name of this fish?”.  However, the group’s curiosity is piqued and a discussion (profound or trivial) ensues on just when do fish have names.

Now imagine that your book club meets to discuss a book you’ve all just read, and wonderfully the author of this book has graciously accepted your invitation to join in the discussion. You have a nice hour and a half online with him during which the author gamely addresses all of your questions, book related or not, making some profound comments and asking some profound questions although perhaps some of what seems profound later seems trivial.

The House of Baloney Research Institute (HoBRI) recently did the book club thing with Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants. To be sure, he invited us (as part of an invitation to the general public) to buy nine copies of his book, thereby securing ninety minutes of his time with up to nine people. In the book, Kelley coins the word “technium” to identify the entirety of the designed world, including not only the human artifacts but its propensity to become exponentially more sophisticated and capable, and including mindless design processes such as biological evolution. While it’s hard not to accept his argument that the technium will eventually exceed the abilities of the human brain, we found our communications on the technical reasons for his conclusions to be similar to Pat’s conversation at the dinner party. After much jollity and conversation about the technium, Kevin wondered “when will the technium ever have a thought?”.

At first, this seems like a profound question. Is humanity’s legacy of science fiction to be wasted, or will we be ready to embrace (or confront!) our new cognitive partner(s) in a meaningful way? Who could fail to be excited by the notion, less fantastic as the technium grows, that we, alive today, will be the first to communicate with such a novel entity? Given the immensity of the prospects for internet intelligence, why are we looking for extraterrestrial intelligence when we should be looking for internet intelligence?   Our curiosity has been piqued and this question the subject of many subsequent discussions (profound or trivial) at HoBRI research sessions and Office Hour with +Dean Calahan.  This little HoBRI contribution can only be called a kind of riff on a groove, inspired by jollity, camaraderie, and maybe a bit of hand-crafted hoppiness.

“FISH” “NEVER” “HAVE” “NAMES”

“Thought” thoughts are abundant in the philososphere.  ”Internet thought” thoughts (give a dog a bone) are only as profound as asking when fish have names. Guppies “have” names when their owners assign them, but our naming has nothing to do with whether guppies have names for themselves. Our names for them stay in our brains, never entering theirs. Looking for thoughts in the technium may be as inherently fruitless as looking for (human-defined) fish names in fish brains.

On third thought, internet consciousness seems profound again. And then trivial, and then profound, and then… blah blah blah. The word “thought” itself is but a name we use to describe part of the illusion that is consciousness. What actually happens in the brain when we introspect is only slowly becoming evident. Any technium-specific thoughts similar to ours are likely to be functional illusions within a technium analog of the cerebral cortex (if these distinctions are even meaningful). We may even learn how to install such illusory constructs at will. If did, then we would know that the technium had thoughts because we would have provided them.

But what what if the technium is already thinking? Is global consciousness emerging (there’s a thought!)? Where would we even look for it? The reason our thoughts operate the way they do is because that’s the way they grew. Neuroscience is beginning to understand how our thoughts happen because it knows the brain is the place to look. Where in the technium should we look for thoughts? Its evolution works differently from ours, with different substrates and different rules. How would we even define a thought in such a system? If the technium independently evolves functions that fulfill the roles for it that consciousness does for us, wouldn’t we have to call the technium conscious?

A corollary to technium-mentation being too foreign for human consideration is that it may never evolve its own thoughts until it encounters other technia. A significant part of human thought is devoted to imagining what is going on in other brains, and drafting all sorts of plans for future eating, breeding, or fighting based on those imaginings. Indeed, the very ability to model other brains gives a human brain the ability to model and control itself. The very act of self-modeling may be what gives us our own particular human form of consciousness, our sensation of introspection or an illusion that feels like introspection. Unless there are aliens, and until we have physical contact with them, the technium may never evolve its own consciousness. For the technium to think, we may need to find ET after all.

FISH? HELL! ELECTRONS HAVE NAMES: A CALCULUS OF SIMILARITY

Maybe. Now imagine you accept an invitation to a swank, if bizarre, info-monastary/resort/retreat center. Swank because every comfort you are used to is freely available, but bizarre because you are locked inside your room, as are all the other guests inside theirs. You never encounter another living being in person. Your room is fully equipped with all of the latest computer gadgets, fully loaded with software that makes it easy to create digital artifacts, whether by writing, drawing, running simulations or whatever, but you are not connected to the internet. Your only audience or info source is the other guests, and the same with them. Everybody can post their creations to their digital “wall”, which anybody can view. Anybody can make copies of whatever they view on any wall, incorporating the information into their digital artifacts if and however they see fit. Even more bizarre, nobody speaks the same language. Written language would be used sparingly at first, though a common lingo or jargon would surely evolve. At first communications would be only through pictures and non-word sounds or music.

Behind the scenes, the hardware that serves this social networking environment is a vast cloud of enormous computing power, monitoring the attempted communications on everybody’s walls, finding correlations between various signals and eventually mapping, if only by brute force and statistics, the developing and ongoing conversations. Using every imaginable computing technique from bottom up to top down, simulation, emulation, whatever it takes, the system works relentlessly to optimize its computations to use the least resources it can.

At this point, you may be expecting some kind of metaphor intended to make you suppose that this resort operating system is actually thinking. Else why such an elaborate scheme? Unfortunately we’re only halfway through describing this scenario, and that’s not actually the point. Nor are there alien guests from other worlds. Everything is totally mundane.

Continuing the development of our metaphor, suppose all these back-end servers can issue work orders to suppliers and technicians (human and virtual) to reconfigure the network to absorb the latest technology available and that all the various embodiments of symbol/communication understanding have access to each others’ code, for reuse or analysis, and to the code for all the other computing clouds for similar resorts. We would expect computations to evolve which have no direct interaction with humans, ever. No matter what humans may do with their gadgets, these janitorial code clouds are unaffected in any operations they need to complete. Still, in their relentless optimization, these clouds would surely find underused patterns in the digital flow of the human content, and exploit that, if indeed their fitness landscape has particularly good minima that incorporate such tricks.

If there can be thoughts in the technium at all, must not these behind the scenes algorithmics be thoughts? Inherent aspects of their functioning ride upon human thoughts as closely as they can without using human brains – as close to being brain-thoughts as they can, and yet not being embrained, they are independent. This product of algorithmic activity, storage and retrieval, cataloging, modeling, peer-to-peer exchange, embodied in the massive voids in the data streams that humans leave to be exploited: Is this not language?

WE FISH, THEY FISH, I FISH, YOU FISH

Now imagine you are a fish. That is, similar to being invited to a dinner party, or a futuristic room, you are invited to be a guppy in a fishbowl. Like Merlin and Wart in The Once and Future King, some kind of high tech allows you to experience the mental life of a fish. Contrived as the futuristic room gedanken was, the fishbowl is even more contrived: to imagine being a fish you have to sacrifice the very ability to imagine what it is like to be a different consciousness. The futuristic room only requires you to extrapolate current technology; the fishbowl requires you nearly to suppose near-magic. How can you get a sense of what it must be like to just float there waiting to fight, flee, forage or fornicate, while noticing that you are imagining all that?

And why stop with fish? If we can imagine propelling two electrons towards each other through a vacuum, such that they bounce or veer away from each other, why can’t we suppose that each electron is experiencing some thought-primitive or other. The question becomes one of scale and emergence – is it the underlying physics that defines the presence of thought, or the specific patterns and dynamics that occur? Is rate important – do plants think? or insect colonies or slime molds? Is thought so inherently boring, when you get down to it, that our philosophizing about it is little more than a symptom of unwarranted self-regard? It sure doesn’t feel that way, but maybe that’s just part of the illusion.