Thursday, December 3, 2020

Friday Thinking 4 Dec 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.’

“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon





All of this is part of a much larger shift in the very scope of science, from studying what is to what could be. In the 20th century, scientists sought out the building blocks of reality: the molecules, atoms and elementary particles out of which all matter is made; the cells, proteins and genes that make life possible; the bits, algorithms and networks that form the foundation of information and intelligence, both human and artificial. This century, instead, we will begin to explore all there is to be made with these building blocks.

For even with 14 billion years of an expanding universe and almost 4 billion years of life on Earth, nature has explored only the tiniest fraction of all of the possible designs.

The natural processes on Earth and in the universe have produced only a small sample of the full menu of molecules and forms of matter, and consequently of the corresponding laws of physics they will have to obey.

Nature’s agonizingly slow process of discovery, driven by cosmological and biological evolution on time scales of millions and billions of years, is accelerated to breakneck speeds in the laboratory. Such work might feel, at first, like “artificial” science. But a genetically designed bacterium is in no way less real, or less worthy of study, than one found in the wild. Nor are the novel one- and two-dimensional materials that display the curiosities of quantum theory. Rather, such new technologies effectively “liberate” quantum mechanics from the confines of atoms and molecules and bring it to the macroscopic scales of everyday life. At some point, we will be able to order every item on the menu of reality.

Contemplating the End of Physics




While peripersonal space first evolved for self-defence, then, its mechanisms have clearly been recycled to take advantage of opportunities in the immediate surroundings. This shift of function is in line with our general understanding of how evolution works by co-opting or recycling existing resources for new uses. ‘Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works on what already exists, either transforming a system to give it new functions or combining several systems to produce a more elaborate one,’ as the Nobel laureate François Jacob put it.

This process is known formally as exaptation. While an adaptation is a new trait that was selected for the way it improved an organism’s fitness, exaptations retool existing useful structures for new purposes. A classic example of exaptation concerns the role of feathers in birds, which would have been originally selected due to their role in thermoregulation and only later co-opted for flight. Some cognitive abilities (maybe most of them) can also be conceived of as exaptations of existing brain resources: brain regions aren’t dedicated to a single task but are recycled to support numerous cognitive abilities. Recycling makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, since it’s more efficient than developing whole new neural systems.

How close is too close?




Human beings are storytelling creatures: we spin narratives in order to construct our world. Whether on the cave walls of Lascaux or the golden record stored on the Voyager spacecraft, we want to share our selves and what matters to us through words, actions, even silence. Self-making narratives create the maps of the totality of our physical reality and experiences – or, as philosophers sometimes say, of the lifeworlds that we inhabit. And just as narratives can create worlds, they can also destroy them.

Trauma is not a virus to be medicated away, nor a tale to be forgotten, nor a deep sadness to be replaced with reckless optimism. What it can be is a catalyst for different stories – better stories – about who we are, what we value, and how we might live in the ‘after’. And these stories are not happiness-seeking – they are meaning-making, meaning-remaking. They are the narratives of tragic optimism that don’t fall prey to comfortable amnesias or myths of human invulnerability. They harbour no illusions about the indestructibility of our worlds. Perhaps if we engage with our traumas less reluctantly and open up to the possibilities of narrative world-remaking, we might integrate some of our worst experiences into the ever-evolving stories about who we are. However uneasily, we just might coexist with, and even flourish in, their glare. Because trauma can, and will, unmake our worlds again.

Trauma unmakes the world of the self. Can stories repair it?




I do want to say something about leadership.  Leadership is the art of getting the public to pay attention to something that it often doesn't want to pay attention to.  Leadership takes guts.  Public leadership is the hardest of all.  When the Kennedys and before them FDR paid attention and got the public to pay attention to what it needs to pay attention to, they did not rely on polls.  You can't lead the public to where it already is because it's already there.  That's what polls tell you.  You can't educate the public about what it doesn't want to be educated if you are catering and pandering to a public that already has certain preconceptions. 

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: HIS LIFE AND TIMES




We are in a time of change in the conditions of change - where the simple is too often the argument for making our problems and discussions simplistic. This is an important signal of the looming crisis of legitimacy of our systems and institutions.
my first lesson from Dynamics in Action. At the level of a system such as representative democracy, cause and effect function in unexpected ways. It’s remarkable how powerful a hold Newton’s idea of billiard-ball causation has on the modern mind: we speak rather glibly of “social forces,” “political movements,” and “revolutions” as if there were a mechanics of human affairs, and we are constantly predicting events with the confidence of an astronomer announcing a solar eclipse.

The Rise and Fall of Institutions

Alicia Juarrero shows how to think big about democracy
A characteristic of our strange moment in history is our fixation with details and our indifference to the big picture. It should be clear, to anyone with eyes to see, that the institutions of representative democracy are maladapted to the digital age. The democratic system—let’s agree to call it that—has lost the public’s trust and is bleeding out authority. Street revolts and populism are increasingly the result. For those who care about democracy, one would think that adapting the system to digital technology in a way that embraces and reconciles the public would be the main topic of discussion. Instead, we obsess about Donald Trump’s latest tweet, or Dr. Anthony Fauci’s latest thought on surgical masks, or Black Lives Matter’s latest assertion that the great threat to American freedom is posed by urban police departments.
It’s as if we can’t see the forest for a leaf.

If we wish to reform our democratic institutions, we should probably focus on structure rather than noise and raise up our eyes from the parts to the whole. Complex systems like our democracy, it turns out, are found everywhere in natural and human arrangements, and in all cases, they behave in a broadly similar manner. They go through a particular life cycle. In recent decades, a group of scholars has dedicated considerable ingenuity to studying the behavior of existing systems. And, though much remains to be learned, these specialists have uncovered fascinating patterns that can help us think about our institutions from the perspective of the big picture.


This is an important signal in these days of looming authoritarianism and anxieties for the future of democracy. Many social animals use systems of quorum sensing to make decisions - a deep foundation for evolving democratic institutions - that can enable group commitments.

Alpha animals must bow to the majority when they abuse their power

Many animal groups decide where to go by a process similar to voting, allowing not only alphas to decide where the group goes next but giving equal say to all group members. But, for many species that live in stable groups—such as in primates and birds—the dominant, or alpha, group members often monopolize resources, such as the richest food patches and access to mates. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the Cluster of Excellence Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz have studied the links between dominance and group decision-making in wild vulturine guineafowl. They report that democratic decision-making plays an essential role in mitigating the power of alphas by deciding where to move next if those alphas are monopolizing resources.

While it had long been thought that alphas lead the way and decide where the group moves next, studies over the past decade have suggested that all group members can have equal say by 'voting' for where the group goes next. However, it has remained to be determined whether this form of democratic decision-making exists in order to keep the power of dominants in check. "Working together as a group is critical for these birds, as their bright plumage makes isolated individuals easy targets for predators such as leopards and martial eagles," says Damien Farine, the senior author of the study and lead research on the vulturine guineafowl project.

When groups were feeding in large spacious areas, where distributed food was equally accessible to everyone, then all group members contributed equally. However, when dominant individuals monopolized a particularly rich food patch—chasing other group members out—then the excluded subordinates combined their votes to move the group away from the patch, ultimately forcing the dominants to abandon their rich resources. These findings suggest democratic decision-making, as opposed to despotic leadership, has evolved so that all group members can obtain the resources (e.g. food and water) that they need to survive. This would not be possible if dominant individuals always decided what was best for themselves.


A good signal in ongoing progress in the development of alternative intelligence - another stage of applications now loom.
The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.
AlphaFold came top of the table at the last CASP — in 2018, the first year that London-based DeepMind participated. But, this year, the outfit’s deep-learning network was head-and-shoulders above other teams and, say scientists, performed so mind-bogglingly well that it could herald a revolution in biology.

‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures

Google’s deep-learning program for determining the 3D shapes of proteins stands to transform biology, say scientists.
An artificial intelligence (AI) network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence.

DeepMind’s program, called AlphaFold, outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced on 30 November, at the start of the conference — held virtually this year — that takes stock of the exercise.

“This is a big deal,” says John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who co-founded CASP in 1994 to improve computational methods for accurately predicting protein structures. “In some sense the problem is solved.”


Covid is not only a huge signal in itself - but it should be signalling many reasons to re-imagine and re-form our institutions.
The 18 years of research done by the UBC team in developing Glybera was paid for by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a government agency that funds basic medical research in Canada.
In fact, it is usually public money that funds the development of a new drug, even in a free enterprise haven like the United States. 

That Time Canada Had a Public Lab that Made Life-saving Drugs

We spend $1 billion on medical research, but have no ownership of the products. That wasn’t always the case.
Created before the First World War, the publicly owned Connaught Labs produced vital drugs for Canadians. It was privatized in the 1980s.
A team of medical researchers at the University of British Columbia spent almost two decades developing the drug Glybera before it was eventually brought to market. Glybera turned out to be remarkably effective — capable in a single dose of treating a rare, deadly genetic disorder known as LPLD, which happens to be particularly prevalent among people living in the area around Saguenay, Quebec.

Yet, in April 2017, for purely business reasons, Glybera was withdrawn from the market and this highly effective drug is no longer available anywhere in the world.

The story of Glybera demonstrates much about what is terribly wrong with today’s pharmaceutical industry, where multinational corporations make life-and-death decisions for reasons that are related exclusively to their profitability.

But it also raises the question of whether the outcome of this sad tale could have been very different — if Canada’s unique, publicly owned pharmaceutical company, Connaught Labs, had remained in operation, rather than being sold off by the Canadian government as part of a wave of privatizations in the 1980s.


This is a strong signal of the relationship between our wellbeing the the microbial ecology that we depend on and are entangled with.
we collected daily samples so we could really see what was happening day to day," Dr. van den Brink says. "The changes in the microbiota are rapid and dramatic, and there is almost no other setting in which you would be able to see them."

Study is the first to link microbiota to dynamics of the human immune system

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers have uncovered an important finding about the relationship between the microbiota and the immune system, showing for the first time that the concentration of different types of immune cells in the blood changes in relation to the presence of different bacterial strains in the gut.

In recent years, the microbiota—the community of bacteria and other microorganisms that live on and in the human body—has captured the attention of scientists and the public, in part because it's become easier to study. It has been linked to many aspects of human health.

A multidisciplinary team from Memorial Sloan Kettering has shown for the first time that the gut microbiota directly shapes the makeup of the human immune system. Specifically, their research demonstrated that the concentration of different types of immune cells in the blood changed in relation to the presence of different bacterial strains in the gut. The results of their study, which used more than ten years of data collected from more than 2,000 patients, is being published November 25, 2020, in Nature.


This is an important signal of several horizons - renewable energy - domesticating DNA - and microbial manufacturing.

Research creates hydrogen-producing living droplets, paving way for alternative future energy source

Scientists have built tiny droplet-based microbial factories that produce hydrogen, instead of oxygen, when exposed to daylight in air.

The findings of the international research team based at the University of Bristol and Harbin Institute of Technology in China, are published today in Nature Communications.

Normally, algal cells fix carbon dioxide and produce oxygen by photosynthesis. The study used sugary droplets packed with living algal cells to generate hydrogen, rather than oxygen, by photosynthesis.


Another strong signal in the ongoing process of making more of Moore’s Law.

Trillion-transistor chip breaks speed record

The biggest computer chip in the world is so fast and powerful it can predict future actions "faster than the laws of physics produce the same result."
That's according to a post by Cerebras Systems, a startup company that made the claim at the online SC20 supercomputing conference this week.

Working with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory, Cerebras designed what it calls "the world's most powerful AI compute system." It created a massive chip 8.5 inch-square chip, the Cerebras CS-1, housed in a refrigerator-sized computer in an effort to improve on deep-learning training models.

Cerebras team leader Michael James and the Department of Energy's Dirk Van Essendelft said in their paper that the CS-1, powered by 1.2 trillion transistors, performed at 200 times the speed of a Joule supercomputer in a simulation of powerplant combustion processes. They said the chip's performance cannot be matched by current supercomputers regardless of the number of CPUs and GPUs they house.


This is a strong signal of the future of manufacturing all manner of nanodevices for all manner of quantum reasons - there’s a great 15 min video illustrating and explaining the process.

Physicists invent printable superconducting device

Superconducting devices such as SQUIDS (Superconducting Quantum Interferometry Device) can perform ultra-sensitive measurements of magnetic fields. Leiden physicists invented a method to 3-D-print these and other superconducting devices in minutes.

"Fabricating superconducting devices on a computer chip is a multi-step and demanding procedure, requiring dedicated facilities," says Kaveh Lahabi, a physicist at Leiden University. "It usually takes days to complete,"

Lahabi and co-authors have developed a new approach, in which Josephson junctions, essential parts of SQUIDS, can be printed on almost any surface in mere minutes, within an electron microscope.

In this video, Lahabi and co-author Tycho Blom demonstrate their technique and discuss their recent article in ACS Nano.


A signal - to the world that we need to re-imagine how we make and metabolize everything - rather than banning individual types of matter (e.g. plastic straws) we should phase in a ban on all sorts of landfill (airfill and waterfill) - which is a ban on all garbage except food - which we can metabolize as compost for growing food.

China to end all waste imports on Jan 1

China will ban all waste imports from January 1, 2021, state media reported Friday, marking the culmination of a three-year phase-out of accepting overseas junk. 
Since the 1980s the country has imported solid waste, which local companies would clean, crush and transform into raw materials for industrialists. For years it has been the world's largest importer of rubbish, often leading to pollution when the materials cannot be recycled or disposed of properly. 

Hoping to no longer be the world's rubbish bin, the government started to close China's doors to foreign waste in January 2018, causing backlogs of garbage in the exporting countries. Since then, it has gradually banned imports of different types of plastics, car parts, paper, textiles, and scrap steel or wood.

And from January 1 the ban will cover all kinds of waste, according to the Xinhua news agency.


An interesting signal of the re-emergence of interest in the potential insights and therapeutic value of psychogenic medicines. Worth the view - 87 min

Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness

Take an animated journey into the depths of the human mind, exploring three psychedelic trips that changed Western culture forever. Sixty years later we sit down with twelve leading current thinkers to ask: "What can expanded states of mind teach us about ourselves, the world and our place in it?" 






#micropoem 
good fences -
are good -
de-fences -

Foresight-shamanic work - 
to mythopoet - 
 with healing-come-passion - 
plausible hope-fore-futures - 
to wayfind - making -
 better worlds -
#micropoem
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