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
Content
Quotes:
Can Machines Control Our Brains?
Wittgenstein, AI, and the Emergence of Empathy
Articles:
Mahle developing magnet-free electric motor that does not require rare earth elements
Hologram experts can now create real-life images that move in the air
Not graphene: Researchers discover new type of atomically thin carbon material
Researchers see atoms at record resolution
World's fastest information-fueled engine designed by university researchers
New evidence for electron's dual nature found in a quantum spin liquid
A gene-based therapy partially restored a blind man’s vision
Citrus derivative makes transparent wood 100 percent renewable
'Molecular glue' makes perovskite solar cells dramatically more reliable over time
A new era of spaceflight? Promising advances in rocket propulsion
Ancient Australian Aboriginal memory tool superior to 'memory palace' learning
A surprising finding from this research is that the brain does not store information the way we might think — as discrete items categorized logically in a database. Instead, information is encoded as integrated concepts that encapsulate all the sensations, emotions, relevant experiences and significance associated with an item. The words “spaghetti” and “apple” are logically similar in being food items, but each one has a different feel that activates a unique constellation of brain regions. This explains how Just can use the very slow method of fMRI, which takes many minutes to acquire brain images, to determine what sentence a person is reading. The brain does not decode and store written information word by word, the way Google Translate does: It encodes the meaning of the sentence in its entirety.
Can Machines Control Our Brains?
Try to imagine what it is like to be a fungus. Not a mushroom, pushing up through damp soil overnight or delicately forcing itself out through the bark of a rotting log: that would be like imagining the grape rather than the vine. Instead try to think your way into the main part of a fungus, the mycelium, a proliferating network of tiny white threads known as hyphae. Decentralised, inquisitive, exploratory and voracious, a mycelial network ranges through soil in search of food. It tangles itself in an intimate scrawl with the roots of plants, exchanging nutrients and sugars with them; it meets with the hyphae of other networks and has mycelial sex; messages from its myriad tips are reported rapidly across the whole network by mysterious means, perhaps chemical, perhaps electrical. For food, it prefers wood, but with practice it can learn to eat novel substances, including toxic chemicals, plastics and oil. Is it somehow sentient? As its thousands of hyphae simultaneously but independently rove through the soil, is the mycelium behaving as an individual or a swarm? What is it like to be this way?
fungi, even the seemingly singular are many: fungal genomes are so promiscuous and multiple that some scholars have proposed abandoning the attempt to categorise them using the Linnaean system. They are everywhere, all the time: coursing through soil and seabed, ‘along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in rubbish dumps, carpets, floorboards, old books in libraries, specks of house dust, and in the canvases of old master paintings hanging in museums’. If the mycelial threads in just a teaspoon of soil were unravelled and laid out, they might stretch anywhere from ‘a hundred metres to ten kilometres’. Mycelium is a continuous mesh that envelops the earth – strangely, differently, alive and alert.
From Its Myriad Tips
Derrida’s work spawned a whole genre called ‘hauntology’, a pun on the word ontology. Ontology is the philosophical investigation of what there is. Hauntology is the philosophical investigation of what there isn’t. Lost futures, distant pasts, gaps and fissures in our reality that can’t be closed over. Hauntological music tends to foreground the technology that produces it. The sound of needles on records, tape hiss and noises-off remind the listener that there’s an ‘outside of the frame’.
How to deconstruct the world
Modern language is biased towards the categorization of things (that of being) rather than the generative nature of processes (that of becoming). We emphasize nouns rather than focusing on the nuances of verbs.
Wittgenstein, AI, and the Emergence of Empathy
This is a great signal for the looming phase transition in our transportation paradigms and global energy geopolitics.
Mahle developing magnet-free electric motor that does not require rare earth elements
German car parts company Mahle has announced that it is in the process of developing a magnet-free electric motor that does not require rare earth elements. Company reps report that the new motor is efficient and extremely durable.
As many of the big-name carmakers begin switching from gasoline-powered vehicles to those that run on electric motors, the issue of rare earth metals has taken on added urgency—China produces approximately 90 percent of the rare earth metals used in electric motors, and China is the only country that currently has the processing capacity to handle them in mass quantities. This situation has forced car makers around the world to rely on Chinese suppliers, making them nervous.
In response, carmakers and other entities have begun looking into developing electric motors that do not require magnets, which in turn means they will not need rare earth metals. Most of those developed thus far have relied on rotating contact devices that transfer electricity to copper coils in a rotor. The new motor by the team at Mahle has done away with these contacts, making the motor both more efficient and more durable since it has removed one of the stress points. The new motor instead uses powered coils in its rotor, transferring power to the spinning rotors using induction, which means they never have to touch and that the motor has no surfaces that will wear out.
This is a fascinating signal - not just of the movies but of a new form of virtual - actually - mixed reality that is not dependent on fashionable or not eyewear. There is a lovely 4 min video.
"We can play some fancy tricks with motion parallax and we can make the display look a lot bigger than it physically is," Rogers said. "This methodology would allow us to create the illusion of a much deeper display up to theoretically an infinite size display."
Hologram experts can now create real-life images that move in the air
They may be tiny weapons, but Brigham Young University's holography research group has figured out how to create lightsabers—green for Yoda and red for Darth Vader, naturally—with actual luminous beams rising from them.
Inspired by the displays of science fiction, the researchers have also engineered battles between equally small versions of the Starship Enterprise and a Klingon Battle Cruiser that incorporate photon torpedoes launching and striking the enemy vessel that you can see with the naked eye.
"What you're seeing in the scenes we create is real; there is nothing computer generated about them," said lead researcher Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at BYU. "This is not like the movies, where the lightsabers or the photon torpedoes never really existed in physical space. These are real, and if you look at them from any angle, you will see them existing in that space."
The world of every smaller electronic and computational devices also progresses with advance in creating new materials.
Not graphene: Researchers discover new type of atomically thin carbon material
Researchers at the University of Marburg in Germany and Aalto University in Finland have now discovered a new carbon network, which is atomically thin like graphene, but is made up of squares, hexagons, and octagons forming an ordered lattice. They confirmed the unique structure of the network using high-resolution scanning probe microscopy and interestingly found that its electronic properties are very different from those of graphene.
In contrast to graphene and other forms of carbon, the new Biphenylene network—as the new material is named—has metallic properties. Narrow stripes of the network, only 21 atoms wide, already behave like a metal, while graphene is a semiconductor at this size. "These stripes could be used as conducting wires in future carbon-based electronic devices." said professor Michael Gottfried, at University of Marburg, who leads the team who developed the idea. The lead author of the study, Qitang Fan from Marburg, continues, "This novel carbon network may also serve as a superior anode material in lithium-ion batteries, with a larger lithium storage capacity compared to that of the current graphene-based materials."
To understand current and future creation of new materials needs some way to see what’s going on - our capacity to see the very small and the very large continues to advance.
"This doesn't just set a new record," Muller said. "It's reached a regime which is effectively going to be an ultimate limit for resolution. We basically can now figure out where the atoms are in a very easy way. This opens up a whole lot of new measurement possibilities of things we've wanted to do for a very long time.
Researchers see atoms at record resolution
In 2018, Cornell researchers built a high-powered detector that, in combination with an algorithm-driven process called ptychography, set a world record by tripling the resolution of a state-of-the-art electron microscope.
As successful as it was, that approach had a weakness. It only worked with ultrathin samples that were a few atoms thick. Anything thicker would cause the electrons to scatter in ways that could not be disentangled.
Now a team, again led by David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, has bested its own record by a factor of two with an electron microscope pixel array detector (EMPAD) that incorporates even more sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms. The resolution is so fine-tuned, the only blurring that remains is the thermal jiggling of the atoms themselves.
The group's paper, "Electron Ptychography Achieves Atomic-Resolution Limits Set by Lattice Vibrations," published May 20 in Science. The paper's lead author is postdoctoral researcher Zhen Chen.
Someone once told me we can’t eat information (I quipped back - true - but try to eat without information). Well we still can’t eat it - but someone is figuring out how to drive an engine with it. New forms of sensors - could be more efficient and self-sustaining.
"When we see an upward bounce, we move the stage up in response," explains lead author and Ph.D. student Tushar Saha. "When we see a downward bounce, we wait. This ends up lifting the entire system using only information about the particle's position."
Repeating this procedure, they raise the particle "a great height, and thus store a significant amount of gravitational energy," without having to directly pull on the particle.
World's fastest information-fueled engine designed by university researchers
Simon Fraser University researchers have designed a remarkably fast engine that taps into a new kind of fuel—information.
The development of this engine, which converts the random jiggling of a microscopic particle into stored energy, is outlined in research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and could lead to significant advances in the speed and cost of computers and bio-nanotechnologies.
SFU physics professor and senior author John Bechhoefer says researchers' understanding of how to rapidly and efficiently convert information into "work" may inform the design and creation of real-world information engines.
Well we all know that light is both particle and wave - now electrons are found to also have a dual nature - this time it is one particle that is two particles.
"People have been searching for this signature for four decades," Ong said, "If this finding and the spinon interpretation are validated, it would significantly advance the field of quantum spin liquids."
New evidence for electron's dual nature found in a quantum spin liquid
A new discovery led by Princeton University could upend our understanding of how electrons behave under extreme conditions in quantum materials. The finding provides experimental evidence that this familiar building block of matter behaves as if it is made of two particles: one particle that gives the electron its negative charge and another that supplies its magnet-like property, known as spin.
"We think this is the first hard evidence of spin-charge separation," said Nai Phuan Ong, Princeton's Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and senior author on the paper published this week in the journal Nature Physics.
The experimental results fulfill a prediction made decades ago to explain one of the most mind-bending states of matter, the quantum spin liquid. In all materials, the spin of an electron can point either up or down. In the familiar magnet, all of the spins uniformly point in one direction throughout the sample when the temperature drops below a critical temperature.
Here is a great signal related to our advances in domesticating DNA and enabling gene therapies. There’s a 1min video.
A gene-based therapy partially restored a blind man’s vision
Light-activated proteins inserted in eye nerve cells and special goggles help him see objects
A new type of gene therapy that rewires nerve cells in the eye has given a blind man some limited vision.
The 58-year-old man has a genetic disease called retinitis pigmentosa, which causes light-gathering cells in the retina to die. Before the treatment, known as optogenetic therapy, the man could detect some light but couldn’t see motion or pick out objects. Now he can see and count objects and even reported being able to see the white stripes of a pedestrian crosswalk, researchers report May 24 in Nature Medicine. His vision is still limited and requires him to wear special goggles that send pulses of light to the treated eye.
“It’s exciting. It’s really good to see it working and getting some definite responses from patients,” says David Birch, a retinal degeneration expert at the Retina Foundation of the Southwest in Dallas. Birch has conducted clinical trials of other optogenetic therapies, but was not involved in this study.
More progress toward a new building material - transparent wood.
Citrus derivative makes transparent wood 100 percent renewable
Since it was first introduced in 2016, transparent wood has been developed by researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology as an innovative structural material for building construction. It lets natural light through and can even store thermal energy.
The key to making wood into a transparent composite material is to strip out its lignin, the major light-absorbing component in wood. But the empty pores left behind by the absence of lignin need to be filled with something that restores the wood's strength and allows light to permeate.
In earlier versions of the composite, researchers at KTH's Wallenberg Wood Science Centre used fossil-based polymers. Now, the researchers have successfully tested an eco-friendly alternative: limonene acrylate, a monomer made from limonene. They reported their results in Advanced Science.
"The new limonene acrylate it is made from renewable citrus, such as peel waste that can be recycled from the orange juice industry," says the lead author, Ph.D. student Céline Montanari.
More progress toward the transformation of global energy geopolitics.
'Molecular glue' makes perovskite solar cells dramatically more reliable over time
A research team from Brown University has made a major step toward improving the long-term reliability of perovskite solar cells, an emerging clean energy technology. In a study published on Friday, May 7 in the journal Science, the team demonstrates a "molecular glue" that keeps a key interface inside cells from degrading. The treatment dramatically increases cells' stability and reliability over time, while also improving the efficiency with which they convert sunlight into electricity.
The difference is that perovskite light absorbers can be made at near room temperature, whereas silicon needs to be grown from a melt at a temperature approaching 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Perovskite films are also about 400 times thinner than silicon wafers. The relative ease of the manufacturing processes and the use of less material means perovskite cells can be potentially made at a fraction of the cost of silicon cells.
I’ve been reading George Dyson’s new book Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control. In one of the chapters George provides a short history of his father Freeman Dyson - who should have won a Nobel in physics with Richard Feynman for his contribution to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Freeman is also famous for the development of a famous Star Trek concept of the Dyson Sphere. Freeman was also part of the group who in the 50s were working on atomic energy powered space flight - the project was canceled because of competing politics. However, what was old is now new again.
A new era of spaceflight? Promising advances in rocket propulsion
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has recently commissioned three private companies, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, to develop nuclear fission thermal rockets for use in lunar orbit.
Such a development, if flown, could usher in a new era of spaceflight. That said, it is only one of several exciting avenues in rocket propulsion. Here are some others.
In the age of Google Search one wonders about the utility of rote memorization - especially as the digital environment becomes ubiquitous - however - ancient techniques can’t hurt our memories.
Ancient Australian Aboriginal memory tool superior to 'memory palace' learning
Australian scientists have compared an ancient Greek technique of memorizing data to an even older technique from Aboriginal culture, using students in a rural medical school.
The study found that students using a technique called memory palace in which students memorized facts by placinthem into a memory blueprint of the childhood home, allowing them to revisit certain rooms to recapture that data. Another group of students were taught a technique developed by Australian Aboriginal people over more than 50,000 years of living in a custodial relationship with the Australian land.
The students who used the Aboriginal method of remembering had a significantly improved retention of facts compared to the control and the "memory palace" group.
The study led by Dr. David Reser, from the Monash University School of Rural Health and Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta, from Deakin University's NIKERI Institute, has just been published in PLOS One.
#micropoem
Domain of Craft -
enacted Crafting -
Knowing -
the ‘feel’ of things’ -
in a sort of -
I-Thou relation -
When you -
attend the attending -
the multi-channel
ground-of-sensorium -
is revealed as -
quantas of differences -
making a difference -
with path-dependencies -
and emergents -
of -
histories and futures -
it’s the learning -
makes me feel alive-engaged -
it’s this -
the alive-because-i’m-engaged - thing -
the difficulty of the engagement -
i need-to-be valued -
- where i want to be valued -
where i can feel -
i can make value to be valued -
mhm -
wow -
i can’t seem to -
be eating my bread -
and doing -
something else??? -
I think that’s amazing -
exploration -
IS -
the core drive -
to survive-as-entangled -
the -
i can’t survive without ----
fill in and connect -
all the dots -
all the way up-down -
beautifully twisted -
we’re two-gather -
as each-other -
