Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
The Regina Manifesto and the Origins of Canada’s Parliamentary Socialists
Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?
Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light
Articles:
Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police
A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 — and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged
The Hidden Structure of the Universe
Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
Superwhite paint can cool buildings even in hot sunlight
Probing fine-scale connections in the brain
Ultrafast camera films 3-D movies at 100 billion frames per second
New virtual reality software allows scientists to 'walk' inside cells
Synthetic DNA holds great promise for data storage
New evidence links gut bacteria alterations to autism
China Conducts Test Of Massive Suicide Drone Swarm Launched From A Box On A Truck
In 1932, a group of women and men representing workers, farmers, academics, and religious leaders met at the Royal Canadian Legion #1 in Calgary, Alberta — now Canada’s conservative epicenter — to discuss their common experiences of exploitation. Surrounded by symbols of Canadian (really British) patriotism — the Red Ensign and a portrait of the king — they debated strategies to create a nation that would make possible “a much richer individual life for every citizen.”
For those who did not believe in revolution, the solution was obvious: the formation of an electoral party to challenge the Liberals and Conservatives — “the instruments of capitalist interests” — for political power. A socialist government, they argued, was the only way to “put an end to this capitalist domination of our political life.” The following year — the worst of the Depression in Canada — they founded the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
The Regina Manifesto and the Origins of Canada’s Parliamentary Socialists
Until the modern pension system arose about a century ago, aging parents were highly vulnerable and needed their adult children and daughters-in-law to care for them in their later years. This tradition persists in many countries, including the two most populous countries in the world, India and China.
Yes, more and more young adults are living with their parents – but is that necessarily bad?
The upshot is that until a particle strikes a detector, it’s everywhere and nowhere in particular. This makes it really hard to say how long the particle previously spent somewhere, such as inside a barrier. “You cannot say what time it spends there,” Litvinyuk said, “because it can be simultaneously two places at the same time.”
Objects have certain characteristics, like mass or location. But they don’t have an intrinsic “time” that we can measure directly. “I can ask you, ‘What is the position of the baseball?’ but it makes no sense to ask, ‘What is the time of the baseball?’” Steinberg said. “The time is not a property any particle possesses.” Instead, we track other changes in the world, such as ticks of clocks (which are ultimately changes in position), and call these increments of time.
Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light
This is a good signal - of the evolving participatory panopticon and the philosophy of “who better to watch the watchers than the watched” - an ongoing dialectic of power and it’s democratization - for good and/or ill.
Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police
“We’re now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys,” one researcher said.
In early September, the City Council in Portland, Ore., met virtually to consider sweeping legislation outlawing the use of facial recognition technology. The bills would not only bar the police from using it to unmask protesters and individuals captured in surveillance imagery; they would also prevent companies and a variety of other organizations from using the software to identify an unknown person.
During the time for public comments, a local man, Christopher Howell, said he had concerns about a blanket ban. He gave a surprising reason.
“I am involved with developing facial recognition to in fact use on Portland police officers, since they are not identifying themselves to the public,” Mr. Howell said. Over the summer, with the city seized by demonstrations against police violence, leaders of the department had told uniformed officers that they could tape over their name. Mr. Howell wanted to know: Would his use of facial recognition technology become illegal?
This is about six weeks old - but is a fascinating signal of the power of big data, powerful computers, and AI to accelerate medical discovery - just at a time when the exploration space of complex systems is beginning to be perceived.
A Supercomputer Analyzed Covid-19 — and an Interesting New Theory Has Emerged
A closer look at the Bradykinin hypothesis
Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week.
When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson’s group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July.
This is a worthwhile read and view (a wonderful interactive 3D illustration than can also be viewed in Virtual Reality) - it is the simplest clearest description of the fundamental particles - by grasping the description I also had my first intuition that string theory has deep roots in the Standard Model - through different metaphors and visuals. This is the first chapter in a series.
The Hidden Structure of the Universe
Our new series of articles explores the search for fundamental structure at the edge of science.
Chris Quigg, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been thinking about how to visualize the Standard Model for decades, hoping that a more powerful visual representation would help familiarize people with the known particles of nature and prompt them to think about how these particles might fit into a larger, more complete theoretical framework. Quigg’s visual representation shows more of the Standard Model’s underlying order and structure. He calls his scheme the “double simplex” representation, because the left-handed and right-handed particles of nature each form a simplex — a generalization of a triangle. We have adopted Quigg’s scheme and made further modifications.
Let’s build up the double simplex from scratch.
This is a strong signal of the imminent phase transition if global energy geopolitics.
Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA
The world’s best solar power schemes now offer the “cheapest…electricity in history” with the technology cheaper than coal and gas in most major countries.
That is according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2020. The 464-page outlook, published today by the IEA, also outlines the “extraordinarily turbulent” impact of coronavirus and the “highly uncertain” future of global energy use over the next two decades.
Reflecting this uncertainty, this year’s version of the highly influential annual outlook offers four “pathways” to 2040, all of which see a major rise in renewables. The IEA’s main scenario has 43% more solar output by 2040 than it expected in 2018, partly due to detailed new analysis showing that solar power is 20-50% cheaper than thought.
Despite a more rapid rise for renewables and a “structural” decline for coal, the IEA says it is too soon to declare a peak in global oil use, unless there is stronger climate action. Similarly, it says demand for gas could rise 30% by 2040, unless the policy response to global warming steps up.
This is a nice small signal of incremental approaches to energy use reduction that can add up to significant offsets
Superwhite paint can cool buildings even in hot sunlight
A new superwhite paint is so reflective that it can cool a surface to below the surrounding air temperature, even under sunlight. It could help reduce the use of energy-intensive air conditioning in hot countries.
Xiulin Ruan at Purdue University and his colleagues developed a white paint that was so reflective and good at radiating heat that it cooled a surface to 1.7°C below the surrounding noon air temperature during tests in Indiana. Compared with existing, commercial heat-reflective paints that reflect about 80-90 per cent of solar energy, the new one managed 95.5 per cent.
Ruan says his team’s paint is thinner, cheaper and could be easily scaled up. The acrylic paint is made with calcium carbonate, and partly achieves its qualities by containing particles of many different sizes, which help to scatter different wavelengths in the solar spectrum. Ruan estimates a typical US home of 200 square metres would save about $50 per month on cooling costs, compared with using an existing heat-resistant paint.
This is a fascinating signal indicating how we can enable more knowledge to emerge for sharing all manner of big data generated by diverse communities and domains of knowledge - of course - the map is NOT the territory :)
one overarching question: “how to build a common foundation for an evolving standard, while providing a language that can inscribe these variables in its grammar?”
Maps undergo major reshuffle
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has adopted a new international standard, opening the way to a common format for cartographic description. The geographer Erwan Bocher and his colleague Olivier Ertz, who are behind this evolution, walk us through the ins and outs.
A map is an object that transcribes facts relating to a territory (topography, population, temperature, sea level, etc.), through a process of abstraction that transforms data from the real world into a series of symbols placed on a medium representing that territory. We expect maps to be the most faithful possible representation of this information, enabling us – provided we know how to read them – to grasp the geographic organisation of a territory at a glance. However, when it comes to helping decision-making, a map also conveys messages. For instance, the appropriate use of colour makes it possible to represent the concentration of a pollutant in the air, so that areas where a certain threshold is exceeded are displayed clearly.
Prior to the advent of the Internet, in the early 2000s, each community (geologists, climatologists, epidemiologists, etc.) had access solely to their own geographic information. The data was not pooled, and there was no real infrastructure or formats for sharing it. As a result, each group developed their own maps. However, new and widely-available information and communication technologies radically transformed the processing and rendering of geographic information, henceforth enabling broad data sharing within spatial data infrastructure (SDI). A vast undertaking to gather geographic information began, largely encouraged by the OGC.
Mutualising and sharing resources is indeed extremely useful for generating knowledge. Whether for researchers or institutions, the ability to pool data emerged as one of the necessary conditions for improving territorial governance, as well as proof of the effectiveness and transparency of public action.
A nice signal of the continuing progress in the ‘mapping’ of the human connectome
Even with about 1,000-fold fewer cells, the mouse brain poses a formidable challenge, says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is one of the leaders of a global consortium that aims to reconstruct the neural wiring of a mouse brain over the next decade. “We’re dealing with a data set that will be on the scale of an exabyte.”
With advances in microscopy and artificial intelligence (AI), and crowdsourced help from human gamers, researchers are beginning to map neural networks and their connections at ever-higher resolution and scale.
Even among genetically identical animals, Zhen says, about 43% of connections were not the same.
Probing fine-scale connections in the brain
Artificial intelligence and improved microscopy make it feasible to map the nervous system at ever-higher resolution.
There are 70 million neurons in the mouse brain, and Moritz Helmstaedter wants to map them all. He was a medical student at Heidelberg University in Germany when psychiatrists there suggested that some aspects of the human psyche lack a biological explanation. “I was totally appalled,” recalls Helmstaedter, who is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
Although the brain remains a mystery, Helmstaedter was convinced that what goes on there “must be a mechanistic phenomenon in the end, as complex as it may be”. He has dedicated the past two decades to working those mechanisms out — and he and other neuroscientists are finally starting to scratch the surface, one cubic micrometre at a time.
Starting in the 1970s, it took more than a decade to unravel the neural circuitry of the one-millimetre worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. Probing the relationship between genes and behaviour, biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, laboriously traced the fine branches and synaptic connections of each nerve cell, colour-coding them by hand on thousands of electron-micrograph prints. That wiring map — the first and only complete set of synaptic connections in an animal’s nervous system — was stored on a room-sized computer and published as the first full animal ‘connectome’ in a 340-page opus in 1986.
Tracing neural circuitry through the brain of a tiny worm requires thousands of 30–50-nanometre sections. “Even if you’re a god, you cannot cut 5,000 sections without messing anything up,” says Mei Zhen, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Now try doing that eight times. In an analysis described in a bioRxiv preprint in May, researchers led by Zhen, Lichtman and Harvard physicist Aravinthan Samuel reconstructed connectomes across eight developmental stages, to learn how the C. elegans wiring diagram changes as the worm matures from early larva to adult.
This is an amazing signal of the future of science for actually seeing reality and generating data of what we can ‘see’ - and thus begin to understand in profoundly new ways.
the SP-CUP's combination of high-speed three-dimensional imagery and the use of polarization information makes it a powerful tool that may be applicable to a wide variety of scientific problems. In particular, he hopes that it will help researchers better understand the physics of sonoluminescence, a phenomenon in which sound waves create tiny bubbles in water or other liquids
Ultrafast camera films 3-D movies at 100 billion frames per second
In his quest to bring ever-faster cameras to the world, Caltech's Lihong Wang has developed technology that can reach blistering speeds of 70 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. Just like the camera in your cell phone, though, it can only produce flat images.
Now, Wang's lab has gone a step further to create a camera that not only records video at incredibly fast speeds but does so in three dimensions. Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, describes the device in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.
The new camera, which uses the same underlying technology as Wang's other compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) cameras, is capable of taking up to 100 billion frames per second. That is fast enough to take 10 billion pictures, more images than the entire human population of the world, in the time it takes you to blink your eye.
Not only are we breaking unimaginable boundaries in what can be visually recorded - but also the boundaries of how we’ll be able to interact with the maps of reality.
New virtual reality software allows scientists to 'walk' inside cells
Virtual reality software which allows researchers to 'walk' inside and analyse individual cells could be used to understand fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for disease.
The software, called vLUME, was created by scientists at the University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells. Details are published in the journal Nature Methods.
Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.
"Biology occurs in 3D, but up until now it has been difficult to interact with the data on a 2D computer screen in an intuitive and immersive way," said Dr Steven F. Lee from Cambridge's Department of Chemistry, who led the research. "It wasn't until we started seeing our data in virtual reality that everything clicked into place."
Another amazing domain where the maps (as memory) are definitely Not the territory - the domestication of DNA signaling DNA as a media for memory storage.
Synthetic DNA holds great promise for data storage
The European project OligoArchive is working on proof of concept for data storage on synthetic DNA. While this medium is in theory unrivalled in terms of information density and longevity, it still faces technical limits that need to be overcome.
Two septillion bytes by 2025: the advent of the Internet and of wireless networks has led to a massive accumulation of data. "If we were to store all of today's information on Blu-ray, we would need twenty-three piles of disks stretching to the moon," explains Marc Antonini, a research professor at the Computer Science, Signal Processing, and Systems laboratory (I3S) at Sophia Antipolis (southeastern France). A crisis is unfolding, forcing Internet giants to expand the number of data centres, which they build in cold areas due to the enormous cooling problems they generate.
a single gramme of [DNA] can theoretically contain up to 455 exabytes of information, or 455 quintillion bytes. All of the world's data would thus fit in a shoe box.
The scientist and his team are working on OligoArchive, a three-year project financed to the tune of €3 million by the European Commission, and which brings together the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology (IPMC), I3S, the Eurecom Graduate School and Research Centre in Digital Sciences, Imperial College London (UK), and the Irish start-up HelixWorks Technologies Limited. Together they are seeking to develop proof of concept for each stage of DNA storage: synthesising and storing data, and retrieving it as efficiently as possible. The project's goal is to build a DNA disk: a fully functional end-to-end prototype demonstrating that DNA could one day replace current archival storage technologies on magnetic tape.
Another interesting signal that each individual is an ecology of selves - that constitute a self - and also the wellbeing of that self.
“One of the main pathological manifestations of ASD is the dysfunction in mitochondria, major targets of organic toxicants due to their lipophilic properties,” the researchers write in the study. “When the intestinal microbial detoxification is severely impaired in ASD, more toxicants of external and internal origins might enter circulation and injure the mitochondria of various tissues. Thus, our finding of impaired microbial detoxification helps explain why ASD children are so vulnerable to environmental toxins and suggests that impairment in microbial detoxification might be involved in the pathogenesis of ASD.”
New evidence links gut bacteria alterations to autism
A new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, is shedding light on the potential link between autism and gut microbiome impairments. The research reveals a mechanism by which altered gut bacteria populations can lead to abnormal microbial detoxification and mitochondrial dysfunction.
The connection between gut bacteria and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is arguably one of the most intriguing areas of microbiome research. Gastrointestinal problems are common in children with ASD and several recent, albeit small, studies have revealed behavioral and psychological symptoms of autism in children can be improved using fecal transplants from healthy subjects.
Five specific metabolic pathway deficiencies were detected in the research. These deficiencies were linked to detoxification processes triggered by certain enzymes produced by gut bacteria. The researchers hypothesize these microbiome detoxification deficiencies influence the pathogenesis of ASD.
For anyone who’s a science fiction fan and has read about AI, and smart drone swarms (for example ‘Kill Decision’ by Daniel Suarez) - this is a strong signal of the future of conflict - which is NOT about better airframes for human pilots - these swarms can be imagined for air, land, surface and subsurface environments. The short videos are well worth the watch.
China Conducts Test Of Massive Suicide Drone Swarm Launched From A Box On A Truck
China shows off its ability to rapidly launch 48 weaponized drones from the back of a truck, as well as from helicopters.
China recently conducted a test involving a swarm of loitering munitions, also often referred to as suicide drones, deployed from a box-like array of tubular launchers on a light tactical vehicle and from helicopters. This underscores how the drone swarm threat, broadly, is becoming ever-more real and will present increasingly serious challenges for military forces around the world in future conflicts.
The China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology (CAEIT) reportedly carried out the test in September. CAEIT is a subsidiary of the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), which carried out a record-breaking drone swarm experiment in June 2017, involving nearly 120 small fixed-wing unmanned aircraft. Four months later, CAEIT conducted its own larger experiment with 200 fixed-wing drones. Chinese companies have also demonstrated impressive swarms using quad-copter-type drones for large public displays.
