two fish

   Gliese 876 – Howdy Neighbor

Extrasolar Life Briefing
3,000+ visible galaxies (Hubble Telescope)
100 billion stars in the Milky Way
20-50% of stars may have planets
1-5 planets per star may be capable of sustaining some life
Expected lifetime of Sun and Earth: 10 billion years
Credit: NASA

This newly discovered planet is about seven times the mass of Earth, and therefore the smallest extrasolar planet found to orbit a main sequence, or “dwarf” star (stars that burn hydrogen).

Although this new planet is advertised as Earth-like because of its relatively low mass, earthlings wouldn’t want to rent a house there any time soon. For one thing, the house would melt. The surface temperatures estimated for this planet - 200 to 400 degrees Celsius (400 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit) - are due to the planet’s kissing-close distance from its star.

Gliese 876 is a close neighbor at only 15 light years away,
and located near the constellation Aquarius. A 10th magnitude star,
it is too faint to be seen with the naked eye, so a telescope is needed
to see it in the sky.
Red arrow below Aquarius.

The planet resides a mere 0.021 AU from the star Gliese 876 (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun), and completes an orbit in less then two Earth days. The closest planet to the sun in our own solar system - blazing hot Mercury - is nearly 20 times further away, orbiting at about 0.4 AU.

“Because the planet is in a two-day orbit, it is heated to oven-like temperatures, so we do not expect life,” says science team member Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

In our solar system, the habitable zone - the temperate region where water could exist as a liquid on a planet’s surface -is roughly 0.95 to 1.37 AU, or between the orbits of Venus and Mars. The star Gliese 876 is about 600 times less luminous than our sun, so the proposed habitable zone is much closer in, roughly between 0.06 and 0.22 AU.

   Super earth sought and found

Extrasolar Earther
Alien KathleenX
(encased in spun super-gravity body tube)

From a 27 Jan book review by David Bodanis of Einstein Defiant: Genius versus Genius in the Quantum Revolution, by Edmund Blair Bolles (Joseph Henry Press).

. . . Until 1915, for example, astronomers had to just accept that there were certain inexplicable shifts in the way that the planet Mercury traveled around the sun. Only when Einstein published his theory of general relativity did he show that Mercury was in fact following simple laws. If something seems unclear, at all random, it’s because we haven’t managed to look deeply enough beneath the surface.

But as the months went on, Heisenberg and even Born kept on insisting that there was no deeper reality that explained what was happening inside the atom. All we could possibly know, they contended, was that when a certain amount of energy was pushed into an atom, there were varying likelihoods that certain results – such as particular flashes of light – would come out.

Einstein was beside himself. It was obvious to him that this had to be wrong. “I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction.” But however much he tried to prove his belief, other physicists kept on finding evidence that backed up Heisenberg’s view. Before too long, this led to Heisenberg developing his famous uncertainty principle, which made clear just how impossible it was to ever have full information about every aspect of an electron’s instantaneous movement.

Bolles has written the best popular account I know of this central episode in 20th-century thought: the intense struggles between Einstein and other physicists – especially the kindly, shambling, yet brilliantly dogged Niels Bohr – about whether the universe could really be constructed with “gaps” in direct causality at its very core. The decades’ worth of letters between Einstein and his intimate friend Born, first published in 1971 and now reissued with a new preface by American scholars Kip Thorne and Diana Buchwald, is an immensely readable personal account of those debates. They provide even more depth to ongoing efforts to determine what “The Old One” – as Einstein referred to his understanding of God – had intended for our universe.

Gradually the world’s leading physicists moved away from Einstein’s view, and most of them considered him a relic by the time he moved to Princeton in the 1930s. One great thinker who did continue to take him seriously was Kurt Gödel, a quirky, brilliant logician, who had looked at the foundations of his own field – mathematical logic – much as Einstein had looked at the foundation of physics. Together, the two old men would take long regular walks in Princeton. Palle Yourgrau’s A World Without Time captures the mood of that autumnal friendship, as well as showing – though in a manner too technical for the ordinary reader – how Gödel developed musings that Einstein also had about the nature of time.

Was Einstein right about there being an explanation for everything if we look into it deeply enough? For decades almost all physicists were convinced he was totally wrong. More recently, there have been hints that aspects of what he had in mind might well hold. In some final letters to Born, when they were both ill and old, Einstein told his friend of his feelings about it all:

“I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret [my resistance] as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one.”

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

A friend recently asked the question,

“What’s the least expensive reasonable espresso machine
and grinder that I can buy for the home, to make
a decent espresso?”

I’ve tried to provide some answers, and
also wanted to research the field, with a thought
to what I would like to own, at each given price point –
and more definitively, what I hope to purchase myself.

In researching the list below I’ve included a full range of recommended equipment, from least expensive to the “ultimate,” reading the many reviews, comments and tutorials available online. I apologize in advance for omissions; I’ve tried to keep only highly recommended machines with several reviews. At the high end there are many great machines, usually of interest to aficionados who do their own extensive research, so I have included only a sampling of very popular machines, offering good price/performance. My orientation is the North American market.

The more challenging area is in the lower end, where there exist questions of quality, reliability and trade-offs. I’ve tried to provide several options.

One of the most important things to know is that without a good espresso grinder, you should best have your espresso at the café, no matter what level of espresso machine you buy. I found a recommended grinder for $100., and as my friend is a college student, it seems an okay start, but spending around $180.-$200. at a minimun is advisable (see the recommendations). Last, please write to corrent any errors, and offer any alternative recommended set-ups.

Here is the list.

I’d like to thank all the sites (and reviews) I linked to in the above page for providing such excellent information!
Much of the information was gathered from these four sites (alphabetically),
 
Coffee Geek
Whole Latte Love
Chris Coffee
Coffee Kid

Personal experience & caveats:
I haven’t had experience with the machines I reviewed, except the Rocky grinder. My coffee background:
I was a roaster, cupper and espresso trainer for a medium-sized specialty coffee outfit in Colorado for two years, roasting 250,000 lbs/month at the time. Previously, had barista experience, managed a café, travelled Europe tasting, etc. My sojourns in the coffee world as a professional ended about 8 years ago. However my love for coffee culture and ritual remains! My experience with equipment is limited to commerical espresso machines, mostly Rancilio, and commercial or industrial coffee grinders. I am not associated with the coffee business in any way.

I hope the research proves helpful to anyone looking into the marvelous possibilities of espresso, and the bountiful bean.

Seen in Poetry (Magazine) January 2005:

Sunday Morning Percodan
By Austin Hummell

There are days when a big wind kills her son
calling long distance from Uz, Oregon
and even the sunny throne of coffee won’t do
for a mood.
. . .
What is faith
if not this, this opiate reaching its
tiny hands into the lobes of euphoria,
this hymn that dips or psalm that lifts
her eyes, this heart like the swollen
heart of Christ astride a donkey,
with lazy palms of Sunday waving hey.

Austin Hummell is poetry editor of Passages North.
This is his first appearance in Poetry (Magazine, p.286).

Amanda Kidd, writing Sex On Wheels, the post just below, seems to be following many of the ideas presented by Georges Bataille (theological scholar, novitiate; librarian; anti-Facist; surrealist officially excommunicated from its inner circles), concerning eroticism.

In the Foreword to his final work The Tears of Eros (1961) he writes:

In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!

In the final chapter of this work, Bataille wrote about Chinese torture and presented photographs of an ecstatic man who is cut to pieces. André Malraux, then [French] Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, condemned the book [link].

Especially in his Erotism: Death And Sensuality, Batialle viewed “eroticism an aspect of man’s inner life, of his religious life.”

Amanda is observant of a paradox contained in our dual nature regarding the erotic: need and fear – at the center of this paradox is a point of extreme anxiety, which Camille Paglia discusses in Sexual Personae as the juncture between culture and biology. Bataille extends this juncture into unfolding landscapes: hundreds of pages defining and illustrating the lost spirituality of eroticism, blasting through bourgeois limits of propriety much as (to continue Amada Kidd’s metaphor) a sport bike wails through the legal speed limit on a country road in less than four seconds.

The thrill of speed on a good bike is about a lot more than risk, it’s about the blossoming of erotic landscapes, and FLOW; the erotic liberation inherent in “suspend[ing] a taboo without suppressing it. . . . the taboo and its transgression;” that is, entering into a zone of strong juncture – rapture. “Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance.” “The anguish at the heart of the taboo” yields poetic significance, human significance.

Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis . . . (the quotation continues, below)

One of the most provocative writers of the 20th century, well-translated into English, Erotism languishes forgotten. Here are a few excerpts from early on in the work:

FOREWORD

The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him. The saint turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she does not know that his unacknowledgeable passions and her own are really one.

The cohesion of the human spirit whose potentialities range from the ascetic to the voluptuous may nevertheless be sought. . . .

The inner experience of eroticism; the degree of objectivity connected with the discussion of it; the historical perspective in which this must be seen (p. 31-2):

My purpose is to see in eroticism an aspect of man’s inner life, of his religious life, if you like.

I said that I regarded eroticism as the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question. In one sense, the being loses himself deliberately, but then the subject is identified with the object losing his identity. If necessary I can say in eroticism: I am losing myself. Not a privileged situation, no doubt. But the deliberate loss of self in eroticism is manifest; no one can question it. I intend to discuss the theme of eroticism quite deliberately from the subjective point of view, even if I bring in objective considerations at the start. But if I do refer to erotic manifestations in an objective way, I must stress that it is because inner experience is never possible untainted by objective views, but is always bound to some or other indisputably objective consideration.

Eroticism is primarily a religious matter and the present work is nearer to “theology than to scientific or religious history.

I repeat: if I sometimes speak as a man of science I only seem to do so. . . . My theme is the subjective experience of religion, as a theologian’s is of theology.

True, the theologian talks about Christian theology while religion in the sense I mean it is not just a religion, like Christianity. It is religion in general and no one religion in particular. . . . The Christian religion I lay aside. If it were not for the fact that Christianity is a religion after all, I should even feel an aversion for Christianity. That this is so is demonstrated by the subject of the present work. That subject is eroticism. I am making my position clear from the outset. It goes without saying that the development of eroticism is in no respect foreign to the domain of religion, but in fact Christianity sets its face against eroticism and thereby condemns most religions. In one sense, the Christian religion is possibly the least religious of them all.

(p. 36-7) Erotic or religious images draw forth behaviour associated with prohibitions in some people, the reverse in others. The first type is traditional. The second is common at least in the guise of a so-called back-to-nature attitude, the prohibition being seen as unnatural. But a transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends a taboo without suppressing it. Here lies the mainspring of eroticism and of religion too. I should be anticipating if I were to spend too long now on the profound complicity of law and the violation of law. But if it is true that mistrust (the ceaseless stirrings of doubt) is necessary to anyone trying to describe the experience I am talking about, this mistrust must also meet the demands I will at this stage formulate. Let us say first that our feelings tend to give a personal twist to our opinions. This difficulty is a general one . . . . connected with the taboo on which they are based and this duplicity I mentioned, the reconciling of what seems impossible to reconcile, respect for the law and violation of the law, the taboo and its transgression.

(p. 38-9) Eroticism as seen by the objective intelligence is something monstrous, just like religion. Eroticism and religion are closed books to us if we do not locate them firmly in the realm of inner experience. We put them on the same level as things flown from the outside if we yield albeit unwittingly to the taboo. Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance. The worst of it is that science whose procedures demand an objective approach to taboos owes its existence to them but the same time disclaims them because taboos are not rational. Inside experience alone can supply the overall view, from which they are finally justifiable. If we undertake scientific study indeed, we regard objects as exterior to ourselves; we are subjects: in science the scientist himself becomes an object exterior to the subject, able to think objectively (he could not do this if he had not denied himself as subject to begin with). This is all very well as long as eroticisrn is condemned, if we reject it in advance, if we rid ourselves of it in this way, but if (as it often does) science condemns religion (ethical religion) which is patently fundamental to science, we are no longer justified in opposing eroticism. If we do not oppose it we must no longer consider it objectively as something outside ourselves. We must envisage it the stirrings of life within ourselves.

The inner experience of eroticism demands from the subject a sensitiveness to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less great than the desire which leads him to infringe it. This is religious sensibility, and it always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish.

Anybody who does not feel or who feels only furtively the anguish, nausea and horror commonly felt by young girls in the last century is not susceptible to these emotions, but equally there are people whom such emotions limit. These emotions are in no sense neurotic; but they are in the life of a man what a chrysalis is compared with the final perfect creature. Man achieves his inner experience at the instant when bursting out of the chrysalis he feels that he is tearing himself, not tearing something outside that resists him. He goes beyond the objective awareness bounded by the walls of the chrysalis and this process, too, is linked with the turning topsy-turvy of his original mode of being.

To contine the “motorcycle” thread – let’s take a look at some contemporary social issues. What do women riders think of male motorcyclists? An article by Amanda Kidd, which appeared in a Super Streetbike editorial is revealing.

Everyone from feminist scholars to third-rate rock stars has identified motorcycles as potent metaphors for sex. The speed, the danger, the leather clothing, the excitement of a good ride are all very similar to the sensations most of us associate with great sex. And who would argue that a Ducati 998 isn’t every bit as gorgeous as a naked woman, or that the rush of going knee down or carrying a sick second-gear wheelie isn’t orgasmic? Motorcycles are damn sexy. So guys, it goes without saying that the motorcycle you ride makes a powerful statement about your sexual prowess. Quit snickering–you’d be surprised at how much a savvy woman who rides (and what savvy woman doesn’t?) can tell about your skills between the sheets by just a quick glance at your bike. For instance, intelligent women know that ratty stunt-bike riders make the best lovers. Their, um, “services” are in such high demand that they’re barely able to find time to lube the chain, much less hand-rub 30 coats of clear lacquer. Keeping this in mind, it might be helpful to consider the particular statement your own scooter makes about your sexuality.

I’ll start with those cruiser guys, because aside from a red Corvette and a pneumatic, 19-year-old “personal assistant,” nothing screams midlife crisis quite like a chopper. Start with the pipes–even a nun knows a rider’s package measurements are inversely proportional to the length and girth of his exhaust pipes. Other accessories can betray as well. See mudflaps tacked onto the fenders? He irons his socks and wears them to bed, too. Naked-lady murals on the tank? Never seen a real pair of breasts in his life. And ladies, watch out for Harleys with sky-scraping sissy bars out back. His favorite bedroom accessory straps around your waist.

You sportbike guys are almost as bad. A Gixxer with a neon-lime windscreen and polished wheels screams, “I’ll pick you up for our first date in a jacked-up Cutlass with a silly sticker of a cartoon character pissing in the back window, and we’re going to Red Lobster.” Race leathers worn on the street are another red flag, especially those pasted with phony sponsor decals. You still buy Underoos from the little boy’s department and play Dungeons & Dragons. Online. Other sportbike warning signs: fender eliminator? Castration anxiety, and he’s only gonna get off if there are garden shears in the bed. Stealth turn signals? Subscriber to Close Shave. Rollin’ on 190-series rear tires? See “exhaust pipes” above. And pity the poor fool rockin’ a Ducati 9xx with a tank bra and a color-matched seat cover–his bike just screams cross-dresser with a possible secret diaper fetish.

Sport-tourers are definitely the worst, though. VFR/ST4/Sprint ST riders are perpetual adolescents–they play like they’re down with the mortgage and 2.5 kids, but every other Saturday they’re slurping tequila from the navel of some girl named Mindy and conducting field research on the “Mutation and Proliferation of Common STDs.” And nothing says poseur like an adventure tourer. He’s a wannabe rugged individualist who spends all night downloading maps of exotic destinations he’ll never see. Speaking of that GPS clamped to the handlebar–gadget fetish, and definite robot-sex fantasies.

No matter what sort of bike you ride, it broadcasts a crystal-clear message about your sexual peccadilloes. Naked bike? Exhibitionist and nude-beach freak with more hair on his back than his head. Dual-sport riders like to get freaky outdoors, not to mention that they’re not very good about washing “down there.” If you ride a V-Max you’re an S&M enthusiast with a flogger made from spark-plug leads. If you ride a Warrior (or other “performance cruiser") you’ve got the same S&M inclinations, only you repress these by coaching Little League on the weekends. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

So where, exactly, does all this leave a worldly woman rider wishing for a motorcyclist with just the right mix of studliness and sensitivity to sexually satisfy her for all eternity? In my experience, wheelying off into the sunset, solo, astride an SV650. (Which, by the way, boys, is definitely not a girl’s bike!) Most of you biker boyz are too busy standing around the parking lot at some Hooters bike night comparing one another’s “camshafts” to even notice a classy babe like me.

On the money and some fine writing. Got to admire her choice of bike, and therefore man, but I wonder if she’s a bit “cc shy,” choosing a putter like an SV650 as a mount for her perfect guy, when the SV1000 its big brother crouches like a jaguar and handles like Nureyev.

Two links concerning design today.
A long article about Harleys and image that seems largely on the money, from

American Angst.

Well worth some consideration, in terms of the larger picture – described by:

James Dyson in his Dimbleby Lecture [PDF]. He states in part:

We have no choice but to shake off our obsession with styling.

And,

It was this disregard for the engineer’s creation - the manufactured object - that led me to stand down as chairman of the Design Museum a month or so ago. . . .

Random quotes from the above articles:

You’re still the pathetic little balding, overweight, middle aged accountant married to the fat, overdemanding nag that you were one second before you signed the papers on your new Harley and the ink dried. You always will be. Owning a bike isn’t going to change that but this is a moral that so few people today are smart enough to comprehend! Once you crank the engine, you aren’t going to change one bit, except that you will have become a slave to the media, you will have allowed yourself to willingly accept a brand association, and you will have admitted that you’re a gullible fool who doesn’t know the first thing about what a REAL motorcycle is.

Simply put, a Harley is God’s way of saying that you have too much money and not enough brains.

Our only chance for survival is better engineering.

Harley gave up. They quit racing. When their bubble was burst, and new and faster motorcycles were entering the market, Harley simply walked away and never went racing again. Harley left the real world and gave the go ahead to European and Japanese manufacturers that America was out of the performance circle and that America was out of the game. Soon what the British and Japanese engineers were learning at the race tracks, they were applying to their brands of motorcycles, making them faster, better handlers, lighter, more durable, more reliable. Their technology was advancing by the year, with each victory, with each innovation, each design breakthrough.

Milwaukee, you should hang your head in shame for letting down the American people the way that you have. How could you do it? Or better yet, explain to me how you could fool the whole country into believing that it was okay to quit and that you are still the number one motorcycle maker in the world.

We have created a strange society.

When you show off some thing you’ve bought, I guarantee the first question will be ‘Where did you get it?’, not ‘Who made it?’. The inference is, that if you bought it somewhere expensive and exclusive, then it must be good.

American Thunder?

What a joke! You should be scared of thunder. The only thing I’m scared of when a Harley is near is that either a piece is going to fall off and cause me to wreck, or I’ll slide in a patch of oil that the Harley leaked onto the road ahead of me. American Thunder my ass! Thunder is powerful and loud. Harleys are just loud. I think the truth in advertising should apply to Milwaukee as well, if so, it would be called

“American Noise“.

Harley Davidson.
It’s not a motorcycle company.
It is a pagan cult religion for brain dead trend humping fashion lemmings.

And the future belongs to those who use their brains best.

Rise up engineers!

Quotes from a Suzuki SV1000S (V-Twin) Rider, who goes by the moniker “Weekend Cruiser”

“I’d rather ride my SV than push my Harley”

“Chrome doesn’t add more horse power”

“Fringe isn’t cool”

“Chaps and Vests are for Blue Oyster Club patrons only”

“A bandana does not double as a helmet”

“The oil leak shouldn’t be standard equipment”

“I don’t like riding in the “child birth “position”

Here’s the abstract from Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding, by Mark Lemley, a paper you may want to download / read if the topic interests you.

Abstract:
Courts and scholars have increasingly assumed that intellectual property is a form of property, and have applied the economic insights of Harold Demsetz and other property theorists to condemn the use of intellectual property by others as free riding. In this article, I argue that this represents a fundamental misapplication of the economic theory of property. The economics of property is concerned with internalizing negative externalities - harms that one person’s use of land does to another’s interest to it, as in the familiar tragedy of the commons. But the externalities in intellectual property are positive, not negative, and property theory offers little or no justification for internalizing positive externalities. Indeed, doing so is at odds with the logic and functioning of the market. From this core insight, I proceed to explain why free riding is desirable in intellectual property cases except in limited circumstances where curbing it is necessary to encourage creativity. I explain why economic theory demonstrates that too much protection is just as bad as not enough protection, and therefore why intellectual property law must search for balance, not free riders. Finally, I consider whether we would be better served by another metaphor than the misused notion of intellectual property as a form of tangible property.

Sometimes, certain questions have to be asked, if only to ask if they have been asked. Google searches some 6-billion-pages these days, the search string “fish on other planets” seemed worth a try. Rewarded by a hit from an AI forum, “language, mind and consciousness,” which in large part quotes Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Philosophy of Physical Science (1967, p.16; first-publication 1939).

A mention about the AI forum foundation statement:

The manipulation of natural human language by a computer, a major research track inside artificial intelligence, at first seemed like a highly tractable problem, but slowly revealed itself to be prohibitively difficult. The research of language acquisition is today central to the science of AI. How do people acquire language? And how could computers? Is there such a thing as a “universal grammar ? And why is it that machines just don’t understand? The science and philosophy of language are the heart of AI.

Sounds promising, and especially as regards the possibility of extraterrestrial fish ("Few listen when Hoagland talks about the face on Mars. But fish on Europa? That’s a creditable, if fanciful, possibility"). The thread “but is it science” was started by the post below:

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the ususal manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations:

[1] No sea-creature is less than two inches long.

[2] All sea-creatures have gills.

These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. ‘There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.’ The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. ‘Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part of the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, ‘what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.’ Or – to translate the analogy – ‘If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science. You are a Metaphysician. Bah.!

Arthur Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science.

“What my net can’t catch isn’t fish.” Rob Hoogers, who wrote the post, adds, “Still a very good parable, even after all these years.” He adds:

But is fishing with dynamite or ultrasound fishing? Does hanging nets above sea-level have any chance of catching those elusive ‘flying fish’, and if so, are these fish in the accepted sense? Do fish object to us fishing them? Do fish bred in captivity have the same animal rights as free fish? Would there be fish on other planets?

These questions must be asked. The questions have been asked. Questions like, what kind of net, what kind of fish, what kind of science? evolve naturally from contemplatiing fish on other planets. As can be seen, the conundrum of fish on other planets, the nature of scientific investigation and the primary nature of artificial intelligence are closely linked.

The groundbreaking Guggenheim Museum motorcycle exhibit displayed a 1901 Indian Single, (16 cubic inch, 1.8 hp), which is about the oldest motorcycle (really a motorized bicycle) made in America (the motorized bicycle dates back to the 1890s). So it’s been about a century of motorcycles and motorcycling, and now Honda has announced the first motorcycle purpose-built for women riders. It is pretty shocking, in a, duh, belated sort of way. Some of the research has been pretty technical. Here’s one of the research items mentioned:

“We couldn’t understand why Italian women said they had no problem with the riding position on conventional bikes, and why they claimed their feet could easily reach the ground, says Dave Hancock, who despite his sex is Honda’s top “female test rider because of his 5ft 6in and 9st frame.

It only makes sense that there are no female test riders. After what might have been decades of study, Honda finally learned that:

“At first we thought they must be taller, but then we discovered that most Italian women wear high heels all the time — even when riding motorcycles.

These Honda boys are truly up on their game. They’ll need to design some radical foot shifters and brakes for their Italian model, if they go with the research. The same article also reports:

It won’t have stabiliser wheels on the back, it won’t have a shopping basket, and it won’t even have sat-nav showing how to get to the hairdresser.

Haha. Cute. At least Honda didn’t write that. What it will have:

Crucially, it will be easier to ride, with a lower centre of gravity to reduce the risk of “toppling , easier to operate controls and adjustable footrests, seat and handlebars. It will also boast a sculpted seat for added comfort.

Also be 500-800cc, and introduced in the Euro market, begging the question of whether America, for all it’s freedoms, might not yet be quite ready for such social radicalism. The ME-XA is scheduled for release in 2005. It’s interesting that “me” is a pronunciation of the kanji “woman.” XA of course, is merely cool sounding. Another online motorcycle rag comments that:

No one has ever marketed a “ladies’ motorcycle” before, mainly because it would turn-off many male purchasers.

Bizarre. Who makes this stuff up? Where is the reference for that eye-popping stat – buried on page 252 of Men are from Mars, Women from Venus? Anyone who hasn’t taken too much acid can appreciate a woman on a bike, so perhaps what’s implied is that if a “feminine” motorcycle is produced, latent homophobe bikers everywhere will be selling their “girly-boy” machines (to quote Gov. Arnold) as soon as they can shudder out of their leathers. Is this the real reason why a women’s motorcycle is a century late? Honda, at least, has decided guys are finally able to cope with the concept. This may not seem like a Kuhnian paradigm shift to you, but in the motorcycle world hey it’s bigger than the radiator. Hats off to Honda for thinking outside the box.

However. I’d like to add that women have been riding bikes for a very long time. The real issue here is what does “a women’s motorcycle” really mean. Reading motorcycle forums, there are plenty of guys bitching about riding position: seat height, bar width and distance, foot peg position, overall stance, weight, etc. There are solutions to many of these issues, which involve aftermarket parts, and when there aren’t solutions, there are plenty of motorcyle models to choose from. My point is, what makes a woman’s motorcycle paradigmatically different from a man’s? Motorcycle fit, center of gravity, model selection has and continues to be problematic for men, is my point. You know, guys come in a lot of shapes and sizes. It really may come down to a question of degree and overall concept, that is, marketing and image concept, rather than a bike made for women (the term “women’s bike” should be resisted) looking like apples to the current oranges – except in the case of the Italian high heel issue perhaps.

Reistance. What I object to is that, in ‘branding’ move, the existing term “motorcycle” now becomes “men’s motorcycle.” It’s hard to imagine Elena, illustrated above, who writes exquisitely about her Kawi ZX-11 rides, trading her bike in for a ‘ladies’ bike. It’s farcical.

While I applaud Honda’s effort, some misinformation and hype is being dished, particularly when beefy scooter-like-bikes, for example the Suzuki Burgman 400cc and 650cc are becoming popular worldwide. These are unisexual machines. Which begs the question, what is a motorcycle? But why get postmodern.

Here is an informational piece relating to the battle for continued digital rights. The EFF has posted an article concerning future control and ‘lock down’ of upcoming digital TV content. Here is an excerpt:

Today, you can use any device you like with your television: VCR, TiVo, DVD recorder, home theater receiver, or a PC combining these functions and more. A year from now, when the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate [PDF] takes effect, some of those capabilities will be forbidden.

Responding to pressure from Hollywood, the FCC has adopted a rule requiring future digital television (DTV) tuners to include “content protection” (aka DRM) technologies. Starting next year, all makers of HDTV receivers must build their devices to watch for a broadcast “flag” embedded in programs by copyright holders. When it comes to digital recording, it’ll be Hollywood’s DRM way or the highway. Want to burn that recording digitally to a DVD to save hard drive space? Sorry, the DRM lock-box won’t allow it. How about sending it over your home network to another TV? Not unless you rip out your existing network and replace it with DRMd routers. Kind of defeats the purpose of getting a high definition digital signal, doesn’t it?

The good news is this mandate doesn’t take effect for another year. We have until July 1, 2005, to buy, build, and sell fully-capable, non-flag-compliant HDTV receivers. Any receivers built now will “remain functional under a flag regime, allowing consumers to continue their use without the need for new or additional equipment.” Any devices made this year can be re-sold in the future.

We at EFF want to do our part to advance the DTV transition – and the public’s rights to receive and manipulate DTV broadcasts with technologies they choose.

We want to keep the right to time- and space-shift that the VCR has given us (against Hollywood’s protest). We want to keep the fair use rights that let us excerpt clips from press conferences or make our own “Daily Show” from the evening news. That’s why we’re encouraging people to buy HDTV tuner cards now and build multi-function receivers and recorders around them.

Here’s where you can help. . . .

Fractal.org is pretty comprehensive. Wikipedia (where the above public-domain image is located) has a good basic overview of what fractals are, with links. “A fractal is a mathematical object that is self-similar and chaotic. Fractals are infinitely complex: the closer you look the more detail you see. Most fractals are generated by a relatively simple equation where the results are fed back into the equation until it grows larger than a certain boundary. Fractal mathematics, thinking and vision have been taken up in various fields. There are a few webrings: UltraFractal webring, the Fractal Artist’s ring, and the Infinite Fractal Loop.
A few online essays:

The Fractal Revolution by Peter Bearse.
Human life is inherently chaotic. People have felt it to be so since the beginning of recorded time. They have sometimes sensed, but mostly prayed, that the chaos may have an underlying structure. Only recently, however, has this hope been expressed in scientific/mathematical terms, as the tracings of an underlying reality rather than merely the subject of deep human yearning. Until the French Revolution, the structure of human existence was an article of transcendental faith rather than human knowledge. The basic “structure” was millennial – the apocryphal City of God, reified by vain men in the form of monuments and causes. The discovery that the “geometry of nature” is fractal has radical implications for human beings’ understanding of their society and of their role in things social and political.

A Man Who Would Shake Up Science by Edward Rothstein.
Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and his claims surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered underlying principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to the workings of the universe, requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences. He believes he has shown how the most complex processes in nature can arise out of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena — the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns on sea shells — are generated from seemingly trivial origins.

Fractal Evolution by the Leading Edge Research Group.
The physical world, the explicate realm, is structured along the lines of fractal geometry. The basic underlying idea is the idea of repetition of structure in different scales of magnitude. The common example is a coastline. A photograph of a section of coastline from a blimp will show the same ragged contours as a photograph of the whole coast taken from a space station. A photograph of a one-foot-long section of the same coast will also show the same contours. The various coastlines are “self-similar,” each similar to the others in shape, but different in magnitude. . . . “How did nature manage to evolve such complicated architecture?” Gleick asks, rhetorically. “Mandelbrot’s point is that the complications exist only in the context of traditional Euclidean geometry. As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information….” “Fractal mathematics” is comprised of the simple formulas by which conversions are made–fractal to fractal.

Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions by Alice Fulton.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, science has turned away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more chaotic phenomena. Rather than being divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern and repetition that signal structure. . . . It occurs to me that this shift in focus makes itself felt within literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry I am calling “fractal” shares many defining traits of that contested term: postmodern.

Fractals in poetry by Lucy Pollard-Gott.
The method seems to stretch the meaning of fractal, but see for yourself. An example from Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Sail of Ulysses (Canto I)” Pollard-Gott took know as the root. Here are the occurrences of know in the poem:

The Sail of Ulysses (Canto I)

If knowledge and thing known are one
So that to know a man is to be
That man, to know a place is to be
That place, and it seems to come to that;
And if to know one man is to know all
And if one’s sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe,
Then knowledge is the only life,
The only sun of the only day,
The only access to true ease,
The deep comfort of the world and fate.

“Note the occurrences of know organize themselves into hierarchical clusters, that is, clusters within clusters.” Click this link to get a more complete picture of what she’s talking about.

Visiting Cass Dalglish’s page The Textual Dance: Allusion in the Oldest and Newest Poetry, a surprise awaits toward the bottom, a flash-based poem which is a translation of an Ur text composed by Enheduanna (En-hedu-Ana is a title and means The High Priestess [named] Ornament of the Sky). Enheduanna wrote her poem of praise, nin-me-sar-ra, to the female deity Inanna; “pressed into clay over four thousand years ago, [it] is the first document in history to be signed by its author. . .”

She wrote as a poet writes, a poet who has command of metaphor, density and wordplay —— in this case —— sign play. A single Sumerian sign may have five, ten, twenty or more values.

Introductory paragraphs relate the oldest cuneiform poetics to Web excursions:

As we spring and leap and scroll along from image to thought to sight to sound on the world wide web, we leap from one idea to another, tying and untying, twisting and untwisting threads of understanding. This is the use of allusion, the employment of the “leap” to annex one poetic experience to another. It is visible in the works of poets who read their work aloud, and poets who publish their words in the hard-inked pages of a book. It is this very use of allusion that is at the core of every poem. It is this allusive dance which gives the poem it’s energy and its density, regardless of whether the poet fixes a metaphor into paper with pigment, embeds a reference in clay, or floats it electronically in hyperspace.

Ambiguity is essential if we are to understand what the Sumerian poet wrote when she pressed signs into clay, for the signs themselves, multivalent and in some cases embedded one in another, make the poem. This is the Sumerian woman writer’s “feminine text,” which, as Retallack says, “implicitly acknowledges and creates the possiblility of other/additional/ simultaneous texts” . . . When the possibilities of meaning are layered, simultaneously, one atop the other, layers of meaning in a Sumerian text are visible. The cuneiform line seen in this fashion calls to mind what Stephanie Strickland has described as “embeddedness” or “nestedness” in poetry.

Which leads to a discussion of poetry hypertext. Hypertext poet Jim Rosenberg’s Diffraction Through was chosen to illustrate “a cluster of simultaneous thoughts:”

Rosenberg says the electronic poem alters “phrase into super-word, phrase cluster into an ignition where the resonances will seem to move, as a flame moves, though the words are fixed and do not change . . . ” Rosenberg says his images stack “atop one another (as) simultaneities, as the world is full of simultaneities of lives, of thoughts, of desires, of reaching and refusals: the word not as a solo act but as a particle in a field, autonomous, an object in a field where to exist is to be combined, to be juxtaposed, to radiate from a layer, one of many layers: sheets as the great stacks of beckons to the eye call juxtaposed not by design but because to be in a packed cluster of circumstance is the natural condition of being".

This would seem to relate to image schemas, as discussed in Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and memorably presented in H.D.’s Palimpsest.

The cows are no longer simply mad, they are dissassembled. The cowing of nature continues – consumption, dissassembly and transgenic recrudescence: an outbreak of cows. It was recently reported that Britons were harvesting milk as early as 6,000 years ago. Now we shall further cow cows, or resculpt them. What looks like a cow but is not a cow?

Is it reasonable for a cow to have its milk replaced with human milk proteins, that is, to produce human milk for babies to drink? No more artificial formulas! Of course, the calves will be out of luck.

There are a number of potential opportunities for altering the nutritional content of milk. For example, cow’s milk is ideal for calves but not for premature infants. Gene targeting using nuclear transfer will allow milk to be produced in which one or more of the normal cow’s proteins have been replaced by human proteins, thereby improving its nutritional quality for these special consumers.

It is easy to imagine the benefits to humanity. Honestly, why should we stand in the way of ever-more-helpful and healing cows?

Should cows be transgenically altered so that they become disease free throughout the modern industrial cow-processing industry? Mastitis costs U.S. dairy farmers about $1.7 billion annually, including lost milk revenues, and scientists hope that Annie will resist such cellular attacks by secreting an added protein called lysostaphin.

Bill McKibben in his book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, deals with human identity in a transgenic age. It’s possible to keep abreast of the issue here, to some extent. But I am more concerned about the cows. I mean, we will do anything with animals – even give ourselves BSE, a devastating disease which the agricultural insustry continues to hide from our eyes and the law.

The cow is much like a consumer, casting an image passive and dumb: cows seem to be messengers of our future. Is some empathy if not interest called for?

One apparently unresolved question is what is to be done with the transgenic cattle - which do, after all, have a single human gene in them, even if they look like cows, sound like cows, urinate with impressive projectile force like cows, and behave like cows - when the time comes for them to go to that happy meadow in the sky. The Finnish Biotech Commission has issued a statement to the effect that it is not ethically wrong to slaughter transgenic cattle for human consumption. Nevertheless, consumers should be told when the beef on their supermarket meat counter is genetically modified, and when it is not.

Apart from the queasy concept of consuming transgenic cattle, I’m sure we will be told when our supermarket beef is genetically modified. The food and agricultural industry has our need to know at heart. Cow care, cow management; a top priority.

It might be argued that everything is right with this picture: medicines from cows, mother’s milk from cows. If your loved one is dying from a disease a transgenic cow named Annie or Fred could cure, if babies’ lives could be saved and made nutritionally strong from a transgenic cow or so, in the backyard…

It can’t be wrong to change animals into producers, into living software, can it, to re-breed nature?

For a different perspective and response-article to this post read this from crumbtrail. Also related, a consequent post, losing and finding the wild.

Printed dated printed books that is. The image on the left taken from the Gutenberg Bible (1455), the text of Book I of the Maccabees, not to get distracted but found on a Houghton-Mifflin site, a whiz-bang 16 chapter history of western civilization. Before I get to the 20,000 free book downloads I wanted to mention for those interested, a U. Texas, Austin site outlining the history of the book. The anatomy of a page of the Gutenberg Bible is neat, even neater, the British Library has a permanent online collection of international texts, a great Gutenberg Bible exhibition, and this version of the Diamond Sutra, (the image just below) the world’s earliest dated block-printed book (868 C.E.), and you can actually turn the pages of these books online in full color, including Leonardo’s Notebook, Sforza’s “Hours,” and Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, Chaucer, Shakespeare, among others (using the Shockwave plugin). Very cool, turn pages by mouse, and use the “magnifying glass” tool to see fine print. Don’t miss the extremely rare Tyndale New Testament, the first translation of that Testament into English (1526). His work was considered heretical and all copies (either 3,000 or 6,000) were confiscated; Tyndale was strangled and burned on 6 October 1536, for his efforts (that the bible might appear in English for the general reader, rather than Church Latin).

So there really are at least 20,000 books available online, free. The online books page at U. Penn. has that and more: articles, news, reviews, &c. Search by author, title, subject, &c.

The tricky bit is that 10,000 of the 20,000 are from Project Gutenberg is among the most philanthropic online projects of all time. Begun in 1971 by Michael Hart, when he was given $100 million of mainframe computer time, the story goes that,

At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given. . .so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.

He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks. . .which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”

A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.

9,999 books later, Project Gutenberg has released a DVD and CD download, and you can read the details for downloading it here.

It will take some hardware and software knowledge though, to create the DVD or CD. If you aren’t computer savvy, by donating to the Gutenberg Project here, you will be sent two free DVDs (one to give away, they write). To download and create the DVD or CD, here are some steps:

1) The DVD contains 9,400 books, placed into e-text up to December 2003. The downloads are .ISO files, so you’ll need a DVD burner (like Nero), and a DVD recorder. For the CD, which contains 600 books, you need a CD-R recorder, or you can download a zipped file of the texts to load right on your computer.

2) For the CD, go here read the “readme txt” and download “PG2003-08.zip” which is a zipped .iso (370 megabytes) or the actual readable contents “PG2003-08_files.zip” (371 megs).

I downloaded the ISO file, unzipped it (took a while) and burned it to a CD. Make sure you “burn from an image.” In Nero, the command is (counter-intuitively) in the “recorder” menu. After burning, pop the CD out, put it back in, and let it autorun.

What you get on the CD: a complete “authors” list is here.

3) The DVD is a trickier business, and the recommendation seems to be to load free Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network software: BitTorrent or eMule, and then search for the Gutenberg files.

4) What you need is the “pgdvd.iso” file and it’s a whopper, about 4.14 gigabytes. Seems like a challenge.

Anyway, if you just want a few hundred books or so, try the online books page at U. Penn. or Project Gutenberg links. Definitely, 21st century.

One of Duane Hanson’s most famous works is the sculpture Motorcycle Accident (1967). “I have not seen it but I hear that this shock piece is enough to make you sell your bike” (The Bat Guano Museum of Art).

Unsurprising to those of us who ride: Don’t Be Fooled! Motorcyclists live in a mythic reality. Pleasure-seeking fools, unrealistically optimistic and worst of all, guilty of, that’s right, the newset thing since post-post-modernism:

Relative Realism
 

Perceptions of risk in motorcyclists: unrealistic optimism, relative realism and predictions of behaviour

Rutter DR, Quine L, Albery IP.

Department of Psychology, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.

In the first phase of a prospective investigation, a national sample of motorcyclists completed a postal questionnaire about their perceptions of risk, their behaviour on the roads and their history of accidents and spills. In the second phase a year later, they reported on their accident history and behaviour over the preceding 12 months. A total of 723 respondents completed both questionnaires. Four sets of findings are reported. First, the group as a whole showed unrealistic optimism: on average, respondents believed themselves to be less at risk than other motorcyclists of an accident needing hospital treatment in the next year. Second, optimism was tempered by ‘relative realism’, in that respondents who were young and inexperienced saw themselves as more at risk than other motorcyclists, as did riders who reported risky behaviours on the road. Third, there was some evidence of debiasing by personal history, in that having a friend or a relative who had been killed or injured on the roads was associated with perceptions of absolute risk of injury or death–though there were no effects on comparative risk and no effects on any of the judgments of a history of accidents of one’s own. Finally, there was good evidence that perceptions of risk predicted subsequent behaviour, though generally in the direction not of precaution adoption but of precaution abandonment: the greater the perceived risk at time 1, the more frequent the risky behaviour at time 2. The implications of the findings are discussed, and possible interpretations are suggested.

For more on the topic of risk-taking, visit risktaking.co.uk.

Relative realism – bent toward the absolute?

Lanier, who coined the term “virtual reality,” recently gave a lecture entitled a 1000 year optimistic scenario. In an earlier short article, he advanced the thesis that It is collective self-flattery for members of the computer science community to argue that computers can be conscious. I will take the contrarian position and argue that they cannot.

Lanier’s homepage and bio are here. Some people make sense, he’s one of them. Jaron has written one half of a manifesto, which critiques and exposes various flaws in “cybernetic totalist” views (e.g. computers will soon become more intelligent than us). There are several future-truths posed in the manifesto, and it makes for provocative reading. Although oriented to the world of memes and computers and neural nets, it’s more about society, and worth the hassle of relating with sometimes unfamiliar templates.

In the half-manifesto he discusses such perspectives as:

Why stupid software will save the future from neo-Darwinian machines.

The fear: cyber-Armageddon in our lifetimes, a cataclysm brought on when computers become ultra-intelligent masters of matter and life.

For computers to design their own successors, someone has to write the initial software. Humans have given no evidence of this ability.

He also argues against annoyingly prevalent false or reductive scientistic beliefs, arising from the cybernetic totalist/cognitive-science camp:

Is a person a gene’s way of propagating itself? It would be just as reasonable to assert that
“A person is shit’s way of making more shit.”

Cybernetic patterns of information provide the ultimate and best way to understand reality.

People are no more than cybernetic patterns.

Reading in the newer theories utilizing the term “evolutionary” (psychology, linguistics, science, biology, etc.) there seems a sometimes pernicious reduction of the human (or sentient) states of affairs to computer models – as if the computational model contains all significance and intelligence in its orbit. This is convenient for those who believe that human intelligence is a variety or even cross-pollinating simulacrum of machine intelligence.

Here is a shot at a definition of reality, which Jaron articulated in an interview, published in the book Mavericks of the Mind (now online):

David: What is your definition of reality, and how do you think it’s created? In that context, what then is Virtual Reality?

Jaron: You’ll be shocked to know that I don’t have definitive answers to all deep philosophical questions. (laughter) I do have some thoughts on it, though. I’ll start with one definition which is a biological one. Reality is the global expectation of the nervous system for the next moment. In other words, the most flexible parts of the psyche and your body mold themselves to a rolling guess of what will probably come next.

The continuous, cinematic-style experience of reality that we have is an illusion created by our nervous systems. Our direct perception of this world is actually highly flawed. For starters, the blind-spot is a great example. Near the center of each of your eyes is this big, black hole where you don’t see anything, but you’re never aware of it. Your mind fills it in perfectly for itself, which it can do because it holds all the cards. Even aside from that, what your eyes actually see is not what you perceive them seeing. Your eyes see edges and boundaries and patterns and they don’t really see the picture that you see - that’s constructed on a running basis in your brain. They just physiologically do not pick up the picture that you’re seeing now.

Rebecca: And there are all those associations you have developed throughout your life that get psychologically attached to what you’re seeing.

Jaron: Yeah. Have you ever had the experience of looking at something and for a moment it’s just an abstraction and it’s weird and you don’t quite get it, then you recognize it, then you can only see it in the proper way, no matter how hard you try to see it `wrong’ again? Sometimes the top of a building in the distance will blend with the sky in an impossible way. That sort of thing. That’s an example of how every level of your being works together to create your sense of reality. What a computer person would call a `high-level’ idea of recognizing objects like building tops and understanding their functions and relationships helps the supposedly very low level function of just interpreting colors and edges and the visual scene.

So, what’s happening is there’s a sort of rolling effect… I hate to use the word model and I’m trying to avoid using it because I don’t really think that your brain represents the outside world in any kind of codified and consistent way. You don’t even need to study the brain to decide that, you can make philosophical arguments to show that that’s an unlikely thing to be going on.

But, I think on a sort of a more global level, your brain and your body together are adapting themselves to the reality and that’s also the process that lets you perceive it. So there’s this moment to moment process where your expectations happen to match up with the apparent consistency of the stimulation from your physical world, and those things together are reality for you.

David: Isn’t that a model?

Jaron: Yeah okay, it’s a model, but it’s not the usual kind of model that can be represented as an abstraction. I don’t want to say the word model, because if I do then a bunch of academic philosophers will write me nasty letters saying, “How dare you say that!?” (laughter) And yet it’s the closest thing you can say easily. Another definition of reality has to do with the mysterious or sublime stubbornness of things. There are a few things that are just intensely, stubbornly there all the time.

David: Philip K. Dick once said that “reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.” [from the novel Ubik ]

Jaron: That’s absolutely excellent. There are only a few things that fall in that category - I think there are three. There’s this everyday, mundane physical world which seems awfully persistent, and the fact that Marin hasn’t made it disappear is good evidence that nobody could. (laughter) And then there’s the world of moods and essences and artistic feelings and styles, and those things are intensely real to me on a deep level; the sense of experience itself including the differentiation of different experiences. The other stubborn item is that mysterious thing called mathematics - it’s just really stubbornly there.

David: And just a brief definition of mathematics in that context?

Jaron: Mathematics is an inevitable path you go down when you start thinking about things in some way other than as an undifferentiated whole - which is any kind of thinking, really.

The objection: Sir Roger Penrose is incoherent, and Max Tegmark says he can prove it. According to Tegmark’s calculations, the neurons in Penrose’s brain are too warm to be performing quantum computations – a key requirement for Penrose’s theory of consciousness. . . that the ephemeral nature of consciousness suggests a quantum process (Science, February 4, 2000). Answering reply: The main scientific objection to our proposal has been that the brain is too warm for quantum computation which in the technological realm seems to require ultra cold temperatures to avoid thermal decoherence. However recent evidence shows that quantum processes in biological molecules are enhanced by increased temperature. Evolution has had billion of years to solve the problem of decoherence. Consciousness may be a particular form of quantum state reduction: a process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds (Stuart Hameroff, edge.org, 2004).

The above ideas relate to a theory of consciousness explained in answer to edge.org’s 2004 World Question: What’s your Law?. Stuart Hameroff, Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona has articulated

Hameroff’s Law

The sub-conscious mind is to consciousness what the quantum world is to the classical world.

Hameroff’s comment:

The vast majority of brain activity is non-conscious; consciousness is “the tip of an iceberg” of neural activity. Yet the threshold for transition from pre-, non-, or sub-conscious processes into conscious awareness is unknown. The sub-conscious mind as revealed in dreams has been described by Matte Blanco as a place where “paradox reigns, and opposites merge to sameness". Reality is seemingly described by two separate sets of laws. In our everyday classical world, Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations accurately portray reality. However at small scales, the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics rule: particles are distorted in space and time (uncertainty), exist in multiple states or locations simultaneously (superposition) and remain connected in opposite states over distance (nonlocal entanglement). In the quantum world “paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness".

The boundary, or threshold between the quantum and classical worlds (i.e. quantum state reduction, collapse of the wave function, measurement, decoherence) remains mysterious. Early quantum theorists attributed reduction/collapse to observation: “consciousness collapses the wave function". Modern physics attributes reduction/collapse to any interaction with the classical environment ("decoherence"). Neither solves the problem of isolated quantum superpositions which are nonetheless useful in quantum computation.

In quantum computation, information may be represented as isolated superpositions (e.g. as quantum bits—"qubits"—of both 1 AND 0) which interact/compute by nonlocal entanglement, and eventually reduce/collapse to classical solutions.

Based on a 1989 suggestion by Sir Roger Penrose, he and I have put forth a specific model of consciousness involving quantum computation in microtubules within the brain’s neurons. Superpositions of multiple possible pre-/sub-conscious perceptions or choices reach threshold for self-collapse (by Roger’s “objective reduction” due to properties of fundamental spacetime geometry), and select/reduce to particular classical perceptions or choices. Each reduction is a conscious event, a series of which gives a “stream of consciousness".

The main scientific objection to our proposal has been that the brain is too warm for quantum computation which in the technological realm seems to require ultra cold temperatures to avoid thermal decoherence. However recent evidence shows that quantum processes in biological molecules are enhanced by increased temperature. Evolution has had billion of years to solve the problem of decoherence. Consciousness may be a particular form of quantum state reduction: a process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds.

Gmail, Google’s offer of a free gigabyte of email storage and innovate mail organization, is under attack by civil liberties and pricacy groups around the world. In a letter dated April 19, Thirty-One Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail. More recently, CNET news reports:

Blasting Gmail as a horrific intrusion into Internet users’ privacy, a California state senator has introduced legislation to block Google’s free email service. State Senator Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from the Bay Area city of Fremont, said on Thursday that it should be illegal for a company to scan the text of its customers’ email correspondence and display relevant advertising – even if customers explicitly agree to the practice in exchange for a gigabyte of storage.

“Telling people that their most intimate and private email thoughts to doctors, friends, lovers and family members are just another direct-marketing commodity isn’t the way to promote e-commerce,” Figueroa said in a statement, which called Gmail customers’ correspondence “a direct-marketing opportunity for Google.” Google has encountered unexpectedly severe criticism from advocates of more government regulation to control private companies’ business practices. London-based Privacy International has fired off complaints to government officials in at least 16 nations.

Google has reponded, with this privacy statement.

Gmail would use automated technology to scan the content of incoming e-mail for keywords and place related text ads inside the mail. . . If someone sent an e-mail to a Gmail user suggesting they go out for Mexican food, the recipient might see a couple of text ads in the right column of the e-mail suggesting specific Mexican restaurants in their area.

This is from edge.org, who have a section of their site known as the Annual World Question Center. The question for 2004, posed by editor John Brockman:

What’s your Law?

Brockman’s synoptic instructions to the Edge literati (written up in the NYT, WSJ, etc., Jan. 2-10):

There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you’ve noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy. Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law. I am asking members of the Edge community to take this project seriously as a public service. . .

Among the slew of provocative Laws browsed so far, I found Alan Alda’s Two Laws to be standouts:

 

Alda’s First Law of Laws

All laws are local.

Alda’s comment:

In other words, something is always bound to come along and make you rethink what you know by forcing you to look at it in a broader context. I’ve arrived at this notion after interviewing hundreds of scientists, and also after being married for 46 years.

I don’t mean that laws are not true and useful, especially when they have been verified by experiment. But they are likely to continue to be true only within a certain frame, once another frame is discovered.

Some scientists will probably find this idea heretical and others may find it obvious. According to this law, they’ll both be right (depending on the frame they’re working in).

Another way of saying this is that no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg.

 

Alda’s Second Law of Laws

A law does not know how local it is.

Alda’s comment:

Citizens of Lawville do not realize there are city limits and are constantly surprised to find out they live in a county.

When you’re operating within the frame of a law, you can’t know where the edges of the frame are—where dragons begin showing up.

I’ve just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case.

It’s now known that vast stretches of DNA once thought to be Junk DNA because they don’t code for proteins actually regulate or even silence conventional genes. The conventional genes—what we used to think were responsible for everything we knew about heritability—account for only 2% of our DNA. Apparently, it’s not yet known how much of the other 98% is active, but I think the frame has just shifted here.

Welcome to Lawville; you are now leaving Lawville.

Microsoft patents human body as power transmitter, from Tom’s Hardware:

Microsoft has been granted a patent on using the human body as conductive medium for the transmission of power and data. According to the filing, the company believes it can network power-sources and peripheral devices by coupling sets of electrodes to the human body. Microsoft lists patent #6,754,472 as “Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body". The company justifies the idea of using the human body as conductor with the fact that “people have begun wearing electronic devices on their bodies. This would include wristwatches, pagers and PDAs, as well as small displays mounted on headgear.”

In a twenty-first century equivalent of Kitty Hawk, exactly 100 years after the Wright Brothers launched their powered craft (December 17), the first powered test of SpaceshipOne occurred. Burt Rutan with SpaceshipOne has now done something spectacular: sent a person into space – 212,000 feet in altitude, almost 41 miles. Check out the photos page. From here in Japan, surprisingly, neither BBC nor CNN covered the launch event, beyond one-sentence mentions. Rutan’s birds are avant-garde aesthetic marvels.

The cost of the SpaceshipOne project is estimated at $25 million. A single NASA space shuttle flight costs an estimated $500 million. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft has spent “tens of millions” on the project.

The Ansari X Prize:

The step-by-step SpaceShipOne missions are keyed to winning the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million purse offered by the X Prize Foundation of St. Louis. For the cash prize, however, the clock is running: The $10 million purse expires Jan. 1, 2005. The Ansari X Prize money is to be awarded to the first company or organization to launch a vehicle capable of carrying three people to a height of 62.5 miles (100 kilometers), then return safely to Earth, and repeat the flight with the same vehicle within two weeks. Twenty-seven teams from around the globe are vying for the Ansari X Prize contest. The competition is modeled on the $25,000 Orteig Prize — won by Charles Lindbergh after winging his Spirit of St. Louis airplane solo from New York to Paris in 1927.

Rutan is also the designer of Designer of Voyager - the first airplane to circle the world non-stop without refueling.

Been dying for that free mp3 download of I’m So Glad by Skip James? (composer, 1931 recording, lyrics here.) Plenty more where that came from. A couple of sources for free and legal downloadable mp3 archives: Internet Archive: Open Source Audio. Also, Webjay, which has for instance, video of John Cage.

Elena rides her Kawasaki ZZR-1100 through the dead zone of Chernobyl :

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl “dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads. The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes. In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago - except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again… a few centuries from now.

Recently Ulana reported that