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:
Beyond coronavirus: the virus discoveries transforming biology
Homeostasis and a Definition of Intelligence
The Mass Appeal of Reductionist Metaphors
Articles:
AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived
How Hans Berger’s quest for telepathy spurred modern brain science
DNA Has Four Bases. Some Viruses Swap in a Fifth.
Match matters: The right combination of parents can turn a gene off indefinitely
Team develops quantum simulator with 256 qubits, largest of its kind ever created
New production method makes vital fertilizer element in a more sustainable way
World's biggest green hydrogen hub announced for Western Australia
Singapore unveils one of world's biggest floating solar farms
It’s becoming clear that ecosystems and organisms rely on viruses. Tiny but mighty, they have fuelled evolution for millions of years by shuttling genes between hosts. In the oceans, they slice open microorganisms, spilling their contents into the sea and flooding the food web with nutrients. “Without viruses,” says Curtis Suttle, a virologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, “we would not be alive.”
There are minuscule circoviruses with only two or three genes, and massive mimiviruses that are bigger than some bacteria and carry hundreds of genes. There are lunar-lander-looking phage that infect bacteria and, of course, the killer spiky balls the world is now painfully familiar with. There are viruses that store their genes as DNA, and others that use RNA; there’s even a phage that uses an alternative genetic alphabet, replacing the chemical base A in the standard ACGT system with a different molecule, designated Z.
...many scientists’ suspicion that there’s no one common ancestor for virus-kind. “There is no single root for all viruses,” says Koonin. “It simply does not exist.” That means that viruses probably arose several times in the history of life on Earth — and there’s no reason to think such emergence can’t happen again. “The de novo origin of new viruses, it’s still ongoing,” says Mart Krupovic, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was involved in both the ICTV decisions and Koonin’s taxonomy team.
Viruses can also influence other organisms by stirring up their genomes. For example, when viruses transfer antibiotic-resistance genes from one bacterium to another, drug-resistant strains can take over. Over time, this kind of transfer can create major evolutionary shifts in a population, says Camarillo-Guerrero. And not just in bacteria — an estimated 8% of human DNA is of viral origin. For example, our mammalian ancestors acquired a gene essential for placental development from a virus.
Beyond coronavirus: the virus discoveries transforming biology
Anil Seth enumerates five different kinds of self-models: bodily, perspectival, volitional, narrative and social selves. These selves are not orthogonal and perhaps partially ordered in what is a prerequisite over another. In his essay “The Real Problem”:
There is the bodily self, which is the experience of being a body and of having a particular body. There is the perspectival self, which is the experience of perceiving the world from a particular first-person point of view. The volitional self involves experiences of intention and of agency — of urges to do this or that, and of being the causes of things that happen. At higher levels, we encounter narrative and social selves.
all the world models involve the inclusion of self-models. These self-modes are all ‘Inside Out’ architectures. To understand compositionality, an agent needs an intuitive understanding of the body. To predict physics requires an intuitive awareness of where and what direction one is looking at when one makes an observation. To understand how to learn, one needs to know how to interact with the world.. To understand causality, one needs the capability of following stories. To understand psychology, one needs an understanding of oneself. In summary, you cannot develop any of the skills that Brendan Lake describes without a previous grounding with a model of the self. Self-models are a necessary requirement for the stepping stones of AGI [Artificial General Intelligence].
I find it more informative to frame consciousness in terms of self-models. The reason for this is that living things are primarily driven by homeostasis. Antonio Damasio in “The Strange Order of Things” argues that the brain’s function at its core is driven by homeostasis. Damasio writes:
Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems.
It ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing.
Homeostasis and a Definition of Intelligence
To understand physics you need to invent a lot of new languages (see: calculus for Newton). It should be no surprise that understanding cognition requires the invention of a new language.
The problem with our natural language is that it is noun-centric. Unfortunately, all of reality is process-centric. Thus, when we stick exclusively to a noun-centric language, we cannot properly map the complexity of reality.
The Mass Appeal of Reductionist Metaphors
It is a truism of technological progress that whatever can be automated will be - of course there will always be lots of work to do and activity to engage in. But this is a great signal for how things that we didn’t imagine being automated can be.
AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived
Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physics
Quantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘My program has a bug, because the solution cannot exist,’” Krenn says. MELVIN had seemingly solved the problem of creating highly complex entangled states involving multiple photons. Krenn, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and their colleagues had not explicitly provided MELVIN the rules needed to generate such complex states, yet it had found a way. Eventually, he realized that the algorithm had rediscovered a type of experimental arrangement that had been devised in the early 1990s. But those experiments had been much simpler. MELVIN had cracked a far more complex puzzle.
Their latest effort, an AI called THESEUS, has upped the ante: it is orders of magnitude faster than MELVIN, and humans can readily parse its output. While it would take Krenn and his colleagues days or even weeks to understand MELVIN’s meanderings, they can almost immediately figure out what THESEUS is saying.
A fascinating signal for how affordances can enable something very useful from innovation aimed at imaginary possibilities.
How Hans Berger’s quest for telepathy spurred modern brain science
Instead of finding long-range signals, he invented EEG
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain.
In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during maneuvers training with the German military and was nearly trampled. On that same day, his sister, far away, got a bad feeling about Hans. She talked her father into sending a telegram asking if everything was all right.
To young Berger, this eerie timing was no coincidence: It was a case of “spontaneous telepathy,” he later wrote. Hans was convinced that he had transmitted his thoughts of mortal fear to his sister — somehow.
So he decided to study psychiatry, beginning a quest to uncover how thoughts could travel between people. Chasing after a scientific basis for telepathy was a dead end, of course. But in the attempt, Berger ended up making a key contribution to modern medicine and science: He invented the electroencephalogram, or EEG, a device that could read the brain’s electrical activity.
Berger’s machine, first used successfully in 1924, produced a readout of squiggles that represented the electricity created by collections of firing nerve cells in the brain.
This is a signal of the emerging understanding that life itself has been playing around with DNA.
“Here was this wonderful validation that right under our noses, nature has been expanding,”
“It really speaks to the adaptability of the genetic alphabet,”
Z and other modified DNA bases seem to have evolved to help viruses evade the defenses with which bacteria degrade foreign genetic material.
DNA Has Four Bases. Some Viruses Swap in a Fifth.
The DNA of some viruses doesn’t use the same four nucleotide bases found in all other life. New work shows how this exception is possible and hints that it could be more common than we think.
All life on Earth rests on the same foundation: a four-letter genetic alphabet spelling out a repertoire of three-letter words that specify 20 amino acids. These basic building blocks — the components of DNA and their molecular interpreters — lie at biology’s core. “It’s hard to imagine something more fundamental,” said Floyd Romesberg, a synthetic biologist at the pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
Yet life’s foundational biochemistry can be full of surprises. A few decades ago, researchers found viruses that had swapped one of the four bases in their DNA for a novel fifth one. Now, in a trio of papers published in Science in April, three teams have identified dozens of other viruses that make this substitution, as well as the mechanisms that make it possible. The discoveries raise the thought-provoking possibility that this kind of fundamental genomic change could be much more widespread and important in biology than anyone imagined.
The scientists have now reported finding the Z substitution in more than 200 phages. Further analysis of the viral genomes allowed the research groups to uncover a key enzyme for making Z, as well as an enzyme that degrades free-floating A nucleotides, making Z more likely to be taken up during DNA synthesis.
There was a significant debate during the early years of the theory of Evolution between Darwin and Lamark concerning whether acquired characteristic (e.g. big muscles) could be passed from acquiring parent to children - in recent decades we’ve learned about the working of epigenetics. This is an interesting signal about our progress in understanding epigenetics.
In the new study, Jose and his team found while breeding nematode worms that some matings led to epigenetic changes in offspring that continued to be passed down through as many generations as the scientists continued to breed them. This discovery will enable scientists to explore how epigenetic changes are passed to future generations and what characteristics make genes susceptible to permanent epigenetic changes.
Match matters: The right combination of parents can turn a gene off indefinitely
Evidence suggests that what happens in one generation—diet, toxin exposure, trauma, fear—can have lasting effects on future generations. Scientists believe these effects result from epigenetic changes that occur in response to the environment and turn genes on or off without altering the genome or DNA sequence.
But how these changes are passed down through generations has not been understood, in part, because scientists have not had a simple way to study the phenomenon. A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland provides a potential tool for unraveling the mystery of how experiences can cause inheritable changes to an animal's biology. By mating nematode worms, they produced permanent epigenetic changes that lasted for more than 300 generations. The research was published on July 9, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications.
"There's a lot of interest in heritable epigenetics," said Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at UMD and senior author of the study. "But getting clear answers is difficult. For instance, if I'm on some diet today, how does that affect my children and grandchildren and so on? No one knows, because so many different variables are involved. But we've found this very simple method, through mating, to turn off a single gene for multiple generations. And that gives us a huge opportunity to study how these stable epigenetic changes occur."
Who knows when quantum computing will emerge as a viable alternate computational paradigm? This is a small signal of progress.
it is the combination of system's unprecedented size and programmability that puts it at the cutting edge of the race for a quantum computer, which harnesses the mysterious properties of matter at extremely small scales to greatly advance processing power.
"The number of quantum states that are possible with only 256 qubits exceeds the number of atoms in the solar system,"
Team develops quantum simulator with 256 qubits, largest of its kind ever created
A team of physicists from the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms and other universities has developed a special type of quantum computer known as a programmable quantum simulator capable of operating with 256 quantum bits, or "qubits."
The system marks a major step toward building large-scale quantum machines that could be used to shed light on a host of complex quantum processes and eventually help bring about real-world breakthroughs in material science, communication technologies, finance, and many other fields, overcoming research hurdles that are beyond the capabilities of even the fastest supercomputers today. Qubits are the fundamental building blocks on which quantum computers run and the source of their massive processing power.
"This moves the field into a new domain where no one has ever been to thus far," said Mikhail Lukin, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative, and one of the senior authors of the study published today in the journal Nature. "We are entering a completely new part of the quantum world."
A good small signal of new agricultural processes that are more ecological.
New production method makes vital fertilizer element in a more sustainable way
Urea is a critical element found in everything from fertilizers to skin care products. Large-scale production of urea, which is naturally a product of human urine, is a massive undertaking, making up about 2% of global energy use and emissions today.
For decades, scientists and engineers have sought to make this process more energy efficient as demand for fertilizer grows with increased population. An international research team that includes scientists and engineers from The University of Texas at Austin has devised a new method for making urea that is more environmentally friendly than today's process and produces enough to be competitive with energy-intensive industrial methods.
Making urea today involves a two-step thermal process that requires high levels of heat and pressure under controlled harsh environments. But this new process requires just one step and relies on a concept called electrocatalysis that uses electricity—and potentially sunlight—to trigger chemical reactions in a solution at room temperature in ambient conditions.
"Around the world we need to lower emissions. That's why we want to develop these more sustainable pathways to produce urea using electrocatalysis instead of this energy-intensive two-step process," said Guihua Yu, an associate professor of materials science in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering who co-led the team that published a new milestone paper about the process in Nature Sustainability.
It seems like a couple of decades have passed since the ‘hydrogen economy’ was a salient buzz in the news. But significant progress towards the use of hydrogen for renewable energy and maybe especially energy storage has continued.
World's biggest green hydrogen hub announced for Western Australia
Western Australia could soon be home to the world's biggest green hydrogen project. The Western Green Energy Hub (WGEH) wants to deploy 50 GW of solar and wind generation to produce up to 3.5 million tons of green hydrogen or 20 million tons of ammonia a year.
This monster project edges out the 45-GW Svevind project in Kazakhstan that was announced just a couple of weeks ago. It underscores the huge paydays the energy industry is foreseeing in green energy exports.
Yes, hydrogen is inefficient and borderline wasteful compared to storing and releasing green energy in batteries. But the world is aiming to decarbonize completely by 2050, and batteries simply don't have the energy density for many applications, such as long-haul trucking, shipping and aviation. Hydrogen will also be key in decarbonizing steel production – and it represents and energy export opportunity in a post-coal and oil world that doesn't look like it's getting a global energy grid any time soon to share renewable power without putting it on boats.
The new hub would take advantage of Western Australia's excellent solar potential and solid wind potential, occupying some 15,000 square kilometers (5,800 sq mi) of largely red, rocky desert near Kalgoorlie in the south-east of the state. Construction would be in phases, to ramp up as expected demand for these green fuels grows.
Not to be outdone but here’s what a small, very advanced country is up to.
Singapore unveils one of world's biggest floating solar farms
Singapore Wednesday unveiled one of the world's biggest floating solar power farms, covering an area the size of 45 football pitches, as part of the city-state's push to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The project is the country's most ambitious yet, comprising 122,000 panels on Tengeh Reservoir that will produce enough electricity to run its five water treatment plants.
Singapore is among the biggest per capita carbon dioxide emitters in Asia and its land scarcity makes boosting renewable energy sources a challenge.
The prosperous financial hub has turned to setting up plants off its coasts and in reservoirs, and aims to quadruple solar energy production by 2025.
The new farm can produce up to 60 megawatts of electricity, and will lead to carbon emissions reductions equivalent to removing 7,000 cars from roads, according to Sembcorp Industries and national water agency PUB.
A weak signal - that any and every technology can be weaponized. This has glimpses of quite a few speculative fiction scenarios - but this intended use is pretty cool too - what could go wrong?
Swarm of autonomous tiny drones can localize gas leaks
When there is a gas leak in a large building or at an industrial site, human firefighters currently need to go in with gas sensing instruments. Finding the gas leak may take considerable time, while they are risking their lives. Researchers from TU Delft (the Netherlands), University of Barcelona, and Harvard University have now developed the first swarm of tiny—and hence very safe—drones that can autonomously detect and localize gas sources in cluttered indoor environments.
The main challenge the researchers needed to solve was to design the Artificial Intelligence for this complex task that would fit in the tight computational and memory constraints of the tiny drones. They solved this challenge by means of bio-inspired navigation and search strategies. The scientific article has now been made public on the ArXiv article server, and it will be presented at the renowned IROS robotics conference later this year. The work forms an important step in the intelligence of small robots and will allow finding gas leaks more efficiently and without the risk of human lives in real-world environments.
#micropoem
these old movies -
i get a deja vu -
with so many of them
yet i’m sure i never -
had a chance to see them
weird -
we-aired -
we-erred -
we-ared -
we-eared -
we-were’d -
we-were-d -
we----
we are -
death-walkers -
i am feeling -
grateful in this moment -
this space-flight of a life -
from mystery to mystery -
Pondering the effort -
mhm -
the sadness -
of always an imagining -
so randomly actual -
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