Thursday, October 8, 2020

Friday Thinking 9 Oct 2020

 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




Japan has an estimated 613,000 middle-aged hikikomori, a term usually used to describe socially withdrawn adolescents who hole up in their bedrooms, according to the results of a government survey released in March of last year. Among those in their early 40s, as many as one in three said they had become shut-ins because they had trouble finding or settling into a job after finishing school.

Japan’s Lost Generation Is Still Jobless and Living With Their Parents




an article by Jean-Paul Sartre for The Atlantic in 1944 makes me question whether this is a straightforward tale of loss. The French philosopher summed up his thesis in the line: ‘Never were we freer than under the German occupation.’ Sartre’s core insight was that it is only when we are physically stopped from acting that we fully realise the true extent and nature of our freedom. If he is right, then the pandemic is an opportunity to relearn what it means to be free.

...we talk of the ‘negative liberty’ to go about our business without restraint, and the ‘positive liberty’ to do the things that give us the possibility to flourish and maximise our potential. For example, a society where there is no compulsory schooling gives parents the negative liberty to educate their children as they wish. But, generally speaking, this doesn’t give the child the positive liberty to have a decent education.

We now have an opportunity to reset the balance between negative and positive liberty. There isn’t a trade-off between big government and personal freedom: many freedoms depend on the state for their very possibility. What the social scientists Neil and Barbara Gilbert in 1989 dubbed the ‘enabling state’ and the economist Mariana Mazzucato in 2013 called the ‘entrepreneurial state’ are essential for giving us the opportunity to realise the full potential of our freedom.

In a pandemic we learn again what Sartre meant by being free




Although Montaigne despised the religious extremism of his age, he relished conversing with friends and foes alike. After all, he believed that ‘total agreement is the most painful characteristic of any conversation’. Faced with armed soldiers on horseback, Montaigne responds with a willingness to talk, rather than matching the hostility of his aggressor. His love of frank dialogue prepares him well for his encounter with the Huguenot bandits who wish to take him hostage.

So what does this dialogue entail? In ‘On the Art of Conversation’ (Book III, Chapter VIII), Montaigne argues that talking is ‘the most productive and natural exercise of our mind’. Above all, it is a practice that entails a willingness to embrace disagreement. Montaigne welcomes divergence: ‘No proposition shocks me, no belief injures me, however different it is to my own opinion.’ In fact, he compares conversation to jousting; an excellent talker is a ‘stiff jouster’ who ‘presses at my sides, pricking me left and right’. Verbal jousting is beneficial to both parties, since it encourages two minds to push each other into new planes of understanding.

One should engage in conversation without allowing prejudice to form the basis of the dialogue. ‘I am not suspicious by nature … I refuse to believe the most awful and perverse inclinations if I don’t witness them myself, in the same way I treat monsters and miracles.’ Montaigne takes people as they come, without assuming the worst of them before they have opened their mouth. He encourages people to embrace the intellectual challenge posed by an opposing view and listen to an argument first before judging an individual. Responding to the words being spoken takes precedence over the person speaking them.

For Montaigne, verbal jousting is the only way to reach truth





I think that hundreds of years from now if people invent a technology that we haven’t heard of yet, maybe a computer could turn evil. But the future is so uncertain. I don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now. The reason I say that I don’t worry about AI turning evil is the same reason I don’t worry about overpopulation on Mars. Hundreds of years from now I hope we’ve colonized Mars. But we’ve never set foot on the planet so how can we productively worry about this problem now?

I Don’t Work on Preventing AI from Turning Evil





This is an interesting small signal regarding the transformation of transportation - recalling the projected future of the 1950s

France to test 'flying taxis' from next year: operators

"Flying taxis" will start taking off from an aerodrome north of Paris as soon as next June, operators said, in a trial ahead of a vast tourist influx for the 2024 Olympics.
The experiment will take place at the Pontoise-Cormeilles-en-Vexin aerodrome some 90 minutes northwest of the capital by car, according to a joint announcement by the Ile-de-France region, airports operator Groupe ADP and the RATP public transport agency.

A drone-like, fully-electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle (VTOL) dubbed VoloCity, produced by German company Volocopter, was chosen for the innovative trial with flying taxis in a peri-urban area, they said.

The partners said in a statement they had "decided to bring together all the conditions to make the emergence of this new mode of transport possible to complement the existing modes, whether for the public or for goods.


This is a good signal of the inevitable emergence of renewable energies in the transformation of global energy geopolitics
In thousands of calculations using randomly ascribed values for various parameters in different scenarios, the researchers found the cost of green hydrogen ranged from $US2.89 to $US4.67 per kilogram. It was possible to get even lower than this, the researchers said, with proposed scenarios approaching $US2.50 per kilogram, at which point green hydrogen starts to become competitive with fossil fuel production.

How green hydrogen can become cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels

Engineers from UNSW Sydney have crunched the numbers on green hydrogen production costs to reveal that Australia is in prime position to take advantage of the green hydrogen revolution, with its great solar resource and potential for export.

The researchers identified the key factors required to reduce the cost of green hydrogen to become competitive with other methods of producing hydrogen using fossil fuels.

In a paper published today in Cell Reports Physical Science, the authors show how different factors affect the cost of producing green hydrogen by electrolysis using a dedicated solar system and using no additional power from the grid.

Without using electricity from the grid, which is predominantly supplied by fossil fuel electricity, this method produces hydrogen with nearly zero emissions. Being free of the grid also means such a system could be deployed in remote locations with good, year-long exposure to sunlight.


I think this is a good though weak signal that the transformation of energy geopolitics is inevitable - not just in the near-term with solar-wind renewables - but in the longer terms with the alchemy of matter in fusion nuclear energy.

Validating the physics behind the new MIT-designed fusion experiment

Two and a half years ago, MIT entered into a research agreement with startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems to develop a next-generation fusion research experiment, called SPARC, as a precursor to a practical, emissions-free power plant.

Now, after many months of intensive research and engineering work, the researchers charged with defining and refining the physics behind the ambitious reactor design have published a series of papers summarizing the progress they have made and outlining the key research questions SPARC will enable.

Overall, says Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the project's lead scientists, the work is progressing smoothly and on track. 

Greenwald wrote the introduction for a set of seven research papers authored by 47 researchers from 12 institutions and published today in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics. Together, the papers outline the theoretical and empirical physics basis for the new fusion system, which the consortium expects to start building next year.


Another fundamental development of science is the domestication of quantum phenomena and entanglement.
"With this new technique, we are on route to pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of entanglement. The bigger the objects, the further apart they are, the more disparate they are, the more interesting entanglement becomes from both fundamental and applied perspectives. With the new result, entanglement between very different objects has become possible."

Quantum entanglement realized between distant large objects

A team of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have succeeded in entangling two very different quantum objects. The result has several potential applications in ultra-precise sensing and quantum communication and is now published in Nature Physics.

Entanglement is the basis for quantum communication and quantum sensing. It can be understood as a quantum link between two objects which makes them behave as a single quantum object.

Researchers succeeded in making entanglement between a mechanical oscillator—a vibrating dielectric membrane—and a cloud of atoms, each acting as a tiny magnet, or what physicists call "spin." These very different entities were possible to entangle by connecting them with photons, particles of light. Atoms can be useful in processing quantum information and the membrane—or mechanical quantum systems in general—can be useful for storage of quantum information.


This is a great signal for the construction industry - infrastructure and the metabolic-circular economy
By-products of the manufacturing industry are key ingredients of the cement-less concrete—a zero cement composite of nano-silica, fly-ash, slag and hydrated lime.

Cement-free concrete beats corrosion and gives fatbergs the flush

Researchers from RMIT University have developed an eco-friendly zero-cement concrete, which all but eliminates corrosion.
Concrete corrosion and fatbergs plague sewage systems around the world, leading to costly and disruptive maintenance.

"Our zero-cement concrete achieves multiple benefits: it's environmentally friendly, reduces concrete corrosion by 96% and totally eliminates residual lime that is instrumental in the formation of fatbergs," Roychand said.
"With further development, our zero-cement concrete could be made totally resistant to acid corrosion."


A good small signal of the development of 3D printing, nano-scale sensors and other components for the digital environment.
First author Andy Wang, a Ph.D. student from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, used the fiber sensor to test the amount of breath moisture leaked through his face covering, for respiratory conditions such as normal breathing, rapid breathing, and simulated coughing. The fiber sensors significantly outperformed comparable commercial sensors, especially in monitoring rapid breathing, which replicates shortness of breath.

3-D printed 'invisible' fibers can sense breath, sound, and biological cells

From capturing your breath to guiding biological cell movements, 3-D printing of tiny, transparent conducting fibers could be used to make devices which can 'smell, hear and touch'—making it particularly useful for health monitoring, Internet of Things and biosensing applications.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, techniques to make electronic fibers, each 100 times thinner than a human hair, creating sensors beyond the capabilities of conventional film-based devices.

The fiber printing technique, reported in the journal Science Advances, can be used to make non-contact, wearable, portable respiratory sensors. These printed sensors are high-sensitivity, low-cost and can be attached to a mobile phone to collect breath pattern information, sound and images at the same time.


A weakish signal - but one pointing to an inevitable capacity to develop sensors for all manner of medical conditions - one of the benefits of covid - may be an acceleration of medical research capacity and capability.

Researchers unveil sensor that rapidly detects COVID-19 infection

A crucial part of the global effort to stem the spread of the pandemic, therefore, is the development of tests that can rapidly identify infections in people who are not yet symptomatic.

Now, Caltech researchers have developed a new type of multiplexed test (a test that combines multiple kinds of data) with a low-cost sensor that may enable the at-home diagnosis of a COVID infection through rapid analysis of small volumes of saliva or blood, without the involvement of a medical professional, in less than 10 minutes.

The research was conducted in the lab of Wei Gao, assistant professor in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng department of medical engineering.. Previously, Gao and his team have developed wireless sensors that can monitor conditions such as gout, as well as stress levels, through the detection of extremely low levels of specific compounds in blood, saliva, or sweat.


This is a good signal of the emerging fields of new smart materials - understanding their impact is a demanding imaginative effort. There are five less than 30 sec videos demonstrating early efforts.

Researchers create fly-catching robots

An international team of Johannes Kepler University researchers is developing robots made from soft materials. A new article in the journal Communications Materials demonstrates how these kinds of soft machines react using weak magnetic fields to move very quickly—even grabbing a quick-moving fly that has landed on it.

When we imagine a moving machine, such as a robot, we picture something largely made out of hard materials, says Martin Kaltenbrunner. He and his team of researchers at the JKU's Department of Soft Matter Physics and the LIT Soft Materials Lab have been working to build a soft materials-based system. When creating these kinds of systems, there is a basic underlying idea to create conducive conditions that support close robot-human interaction in the future—without the solid machine physically harming humans.

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