Thursday, July 8, 2021

Friday Thinking 9 July, 2021

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




However, the general intelligence that is unique in humans can be found in the complexity of interactions between humans. Language is but a shadow of that interaction. The essence of it is in the language games we play.

The nature of human learning is equally odd. We learn because we participate. We learn because we are embedded in a sensory-motor loop. We learn because we are engaged and it manifested in the engagement of our attention. Unlike a computer where new skills can be downloaded, humans learn by participatory experience. As Feynman said, what we cannot create we cannot understand. We learn by recreating. We learn by doing.

This is not a bug of general intelligence, rather it is a feature. Skills are only learned when an agent is able to recreate for itself the skills.

AGI and the Empathy Prior





In Physics we seek out symmetries so as to find invariances in nature and ultimately laws of nature. In Biology, these invariances are expressed on the notion of individuality or self. Invariance in biology is not just a consequence of causational invariance as found in Physics. But rather a consequence of intentionality enabled by actions forged by causality. Intentions however are a compositional thing. But they only scale if there is shared intentionality across the individuals of the collective.

Civilizations and societies scale and eventually take over the world as a consequence of consensus mechanisms that coordinate the many individuals in their respective collectives. The same robustness that private property renders in a free economy is represented in the individual subject stance of members of a species. Decision-making is local but there is an emergent behavior of the collective that preserves its identity.

The Fluid Nature of Individuality




The fear of AI alignment focuses on the wrong problem. The real problem is that our society treats people like replaceable parts. Until society treats people like a mother treats their child, we are never going to achieve a society that aligns with humanity.

Medieval Bureaucracies are Paper Clip Maximizers






This is an old (207) but brief article that explores futuristic literature.

The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights

Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists — consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen — spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy.

There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic." Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving — think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III — and it generally doesn't hold up well to scrutiny.

The non-futurismic version of NCC-1701 would be the size of a softball (or whatever the minimum size for a warp drive, transporter, and subspace radio would be). It would zip around the galaxy at FTL speeds under remote control. When it reached an interesting planet, it would beam a stored copy of a landing party onto the surface, and when their mission was over, it would beam them back into storage, annihilating their physical selves until they reached the next stopping point. If a member of the landing party were eaten by a green-skinned interspatial hippie or giant toga-wearing galactic tyrant, that member would be recovered from backup by the transporter beam. Hell, the entire landing party could consist of multiple copies of the most effective crew member onboard: no redshirts, just a half-dozen instances of Kirk operating in clonal harmony.


It seems like the graphic novel - or even the short animation may have been a human form of communication even before writing was. 
What’s more, a flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club. In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still - The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information.

Early Humans Made Animated Art

How Paleolithic artists used fire to set the world’s oldest art in motion.
Artists at Lascaux used fire to see inside caves, but the glow and flicker of flames may also have been integral to the stories the paintings told. “Today, when you light the whole cave, it is very stupid because you kill the staging,” says Jean-Michel Geneste, Lascaux’s curator, the director of France’s National Center of Prehistory, and the head of the archaeological project I worked on that summer. Worse yet, most people only see cave paintings in cropped photographs that are evenly lit with lights that are strong and white. According to Geneste, this removes the images from the context of the story they were meant to tell and makes the colors in the paintings colder, or bluer, than Paleolithic people would have seen them.

Reconstructions of the original grease lamps produce a circle of light about 10 feet in diameter, which is not much larger than many images in the cave. Geneste believes that early artists used this small area of light as a story-telling device. “It is very important: the presence of the darkness, the spot of yellow light, and inside it one, two, three animals, no more,” Geneste says. “That’s a tool in a narrative structure,” he explains. Just as a sentence generally describes a single idea, the light from a grease lamp would illuminate a single part of a story. Whatever tales may have been told inside Lascaux have been lost to history, but it is easy to imagine a person moving their fire-lit lamp along the walls as they unraveled a story step-by-step, using the darkness as a frame for the images inside a small circle of firelight.

Geneste supports his hypothesis by pointing to the various sizes of animals. “If you want to have several animals in a narrative relationship it is necessary to have them small,” he says. “If you want only one animal, you make them big.” If Geneste is right, the paintings I saw in the Hall of Bulls could have been read like a comic strip, as a series of frames: first the bison, then two black horses, more horses, a focus on the bison, and so on down the length of the chamber.


The complexity of the problems life presents may be the portals to progress - and certainly evolution. However - this is a weak signal in relation to malaria.

A malaria vaccine with live parasites shows promise in a small trial

Next steps include figuring out whether the results hold up in larger trials
In a one-two punch, a malaria vaccine in development pairs a shot of the live parasite that causes the disease with a whammy of infection-fighting drugs to immediately quell it.

The candidate is the latest vaccine to show promise against a formidable foe, bolstering hopes that an effective shot might be on the horizon. Malaria, a disease caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, affects more than 200 million people around the world every year. In 2019, an estimated 409,000 people died from the mosquito-borne disease, 67 percent of whom were children younger than 5.

The live parasite vaccine and drug combo showed 87.5 percent efficacy in a small group of healthy adult participants, researchers reported June 30 in Nature. The live parasite shot — which is followed by a dose of one of two anti-malarial drugs to eliminate the infection — not only protected people from the same strain included in the vaccine, but most people could also fend off a different parasite strain that circulates in Brazil.  


Covid has revealed the wonder of mRNA approaches to developing effective vaccines and the promises of other treatments. This is a good signal of ongoing progress.
This increased speed may not be the only benefit; more precisely controlling the nanoparticles' size could make treatments more effective. 
"We believe that this microfluidic technology has the potential to not only play a key role in the formulation of current COVID vaccines," says Mitchell, "but also to potentially address the immense need ahead of us as mRNA technology expands into additional classes of therapeutics."

New microfluidic device delivers mRNA nanoparticles a hundred times faster

The COVID vaccines currently being deployed were developed with unprecedented speed, but the mRNA technology at work in some of them is an equally impressive success story. Because any desired mRNA sequence can be synthesized in massive quantities, one of the biggest hurdles in a variety of mRNA therapies is the ability to package those sequences into the lipid nanoparticles that deliver them into cells.

Now, thanks to manufacturing technology developed by bioengineers and medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, a hundred-fold increase in current microfluidic production rates may soon be possible.

The researchers' advance stems from their design of a proof-of-concept microfluidic device containing 128 mixing channels working in parallel. The channels mix a precise amount of lipid and mRNA, essentially crafting individual lipid nanoparticles on a miniaturized assembly line.


The complexity of our biosphere has much to teach us about how new molecules can be found, produced and ultimately manufactured. An amazing part of this signal is that children’s toys have become so sophisticated that afford themselves to be parts in more specialized tools. 
an extract from the leaves disarms even the hyper-virulent MRSA strains capable of causing serious infections in healthy athletes. Experiments also showed the extract did not disturb normal, healthy bacteria on skin cells.
Finally, the researchers demonstrated how the extract works, by inhibiting the ability of MRSA bacteria to communicate with one another, a process known as quorum sensing. MRSA uses this sensing signaling system to make toxins and ramp up its virulence.
"Our homemade piece of equipment really helped accelerate the pace of our discovery," Quave says. "We were able to isolate this molecule and derive pure crystals of it, even though it only makes up a mere .0019 percent of the chestnut leaves."

New molecule found in chestnut leaves disarms dangerous staph bacteria

Scientists have isolated a molecule, extracted from the leaves of the European chestnut tree, with the power to neutralize dangerous, drug-resistant staph bacteria. Frontiers in Pharmacology has published the finding, led by scientists at Emory University.

The researchers dubbed the molecule Castaneroxy A, after the genus of the European chestnut, Castanea. The use of chestnut leaves in traditional folk remedies in rural Italy inspired the research.

"We were able to isolate this molecule, new to science, that occurs only in very tiny quantities in the chestnut leaves," says Cassandra Quave, senior author of the paper and associate professor in Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine's Department of Dermatology. "We also showed how it disarms Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus by knocking out the bacteria's ability to produce toxins."

"We're trying to fill the pipeline for antimicrobial drug discovery with compounds that work differently from traditional antibiotics," Quave says. "We urgently need these new strategies." She notes that antimicrobial infections kill an estimated 700,000 globally each year, and that number is expected to grow exponentially if new methods of treatment are not found.

the researchers wanted to isolate these active ingredients from the plant extract. The process is painstaking when done manually, because plant extracts typically contain hundreds of different chemicals. Each chemical must be separated out and then tested for efficacy. Large scale fraction collectors, coupled to high-performance liquid chromatographic systems, automate this separation process, but they can cost tens of thousands of dollars and did not have all the features the Quave lab needed.

Marco Caputo, a research specialist in the lab, solved the problem. Using a software device from a child's toy, the LEGO MINDSTORMS robot creator, a few LEGO bricks, and some components from a hardware store, Caputo built an automated liquid separator customized to the lab's needs for $500. The lab members dubbed the invention the LEGO MINDSTORMS Fraction Collector. They published instructions for how to build it in a journal so that other researchers can tap the simple, but effective, technology.


Hacking matter is a concept that’s been around for a couple of decades at least. It seems that new signals of the future of matter emerge everyday. Here’s a small signal of new devices, sensors and computational capacity in the next few decades.
"are excited about discovering what can happen in other states we force upon nature and predict that other structures that couple additional degrees of freedom are possible. We hope that miniaturization and flipping through sliding will improve today's electronic devices, and moreover, allow other original ways of controlling information in future devices. In addition to computer devices, we expect that this technology will contribute to detectors, energy storage and conversion, interaction with light, etc. Our challenge, as we see it, is to discover more crystals with new and slippery degrees of freedom."

The world's thinnest technology—only two atoms thick

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have engineered the world's tiniest technology, with a thickness of only two atoms. According to the researchers, the new technology proposes a way for storing electric information in the thinnest unit known to science, in one of the most stable and inert materials in nature. The allowed quantum-mechanical electron tunneling through the atomically thin film may boost the information reading process much beyond current technologies.

"The ability to force a crystalline and electronic arrangement in such a thin system, with unique polarization and inversion properties resulting from the weak Van der Waals forces between the layers, is not limited to the boron and nitrogen crystal," adds Dr. Shalom. "We expect the same behaviors in many layered crystals with the right symmetry properties. The concept of interlayer sliding as an original and efficient way to control advanced electronic devices is very promising, and we have named it Slide-Tronics."


The world is changing everywhere in and in all ways. This is not good news.
The cryosphere holds almost three-quarters of Earth's fresh water, and in some mountainous regions, dwindling glaciers threaten drinking water supplies.

Earth's cryosphere is shrinking by 87,000 square kilometers per year

The global cryosphere—all of the areas with frozen water on Earth—shrank by about 87,000 square kilometers (about 33,000 square miles, an area about the size of Lake Superior) per year on average between 1979 and 2016, as a result of climate change, according to a new study. This research is the first to make a global estimate of the surface area of the Earth covered by sea ice, snow cover and frozen ground.

The extent of land covered by frozen water is just as important as its mass because the bright white surface reflects sunlight so effectively, cooling the planet. Changes in the size or location of ice and snow can alter air temperatures, change the sea level and even affect ocean currents worldwide.

The new study is published in Earth's Future, AGU's journal for interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.


A good signal supporting renewable energy generation for the earth’s colder climates.

Sub-zero water splitting marks a new dawn for solar hydrogen production

Researchers have developed a solar-powered system that splits water at -20°C. The technology could serve as a renewable fuel source in high altitude and polar environments.

Using hydrogen as a fuel source is preferable to fossil fuels as it is renewable and contributes very little, if at all, to the greenhouse effect. In areas where the temperature is regularly below freezing, hydrogen fuel stores easily in tanks, so a method that produces hydrogen locally would go a long way to fulfilling the energy needs of remote populations. A problem with this is that most conventional methods for producing hydrogen do not work well at sub-zero temperatures.

Now, a team of researchers in Germany, led by Matthias May of the University of Ulm, has devised a technology that would allow hydrogen production at low temperatures. The method works by using electrolytes with low freezing points, such as dilute sulfuric acid, to allow the use of water at lower temperatures. This is combined with strict thermal control of the whole device to prevent loss of heat to the environment and to transfer additional heat energy from the solar cell to the electrolyte, resulting in an interior working temperature of around 10°C.


Here is a wonderful 1 hour Youtube from the Long Now Foundation about the Great Mothers of our forests and the plant Internet provided by mycelial networks.

Suzanne Simard | Mother Trees and the Social Forest

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support. 

Simard's extraordinary research and tenacious efforts to raise awareness on the interconnectedness of forest systems, both above and below ground, has revolutionized our understanding of forest ecology. This increasing knowledge is driving a call for more sustainable practices in forestry and land management, ones that develop strategies based on the forest as a whole entity, not on trees as isolated individuals.

Dr. Suzanne Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and the author of "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest" (pub. 5/4/21). An active field researcher for decades, her scientific studies and observations built the foundations for our new understanding of the complexity of forest systems. Simard's current collaboration The Mother Tree Project, is investigating forest renewal practices that will protect biodiversity, carbon storage and forest regeneration as the climate changes.


Another good signal of the emerging transformation of global energy politics.

Battery-powered trains could be a climate game changer. Is everyone all aboard?

Colossal freight locomotives are a fixture of the American landscape, but their 4,400-horsepower engines collectively burn 3.5 billion gallons of diesel annually, at a time when railroads and other fossil fuel users face pressure to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

With little fanfare, however, the industry has begun operating locomotives that run on stored electrical power, moving toward a future in which toy shops are not the only source of battery trains. American passenger lines could also be transformed by the technology, though California rail officials say it will not work for the state's bullet train.

In a just-completed test, BNSF ran a freight train from Barstow to Stockton with an experimental battery locomotive, coupled with two diesel locomotives, and achieved an 11% reduction in fuel consumption, along with similar reductions in emissions of nitrogen oxides, small particulates and greenhouse gasses. An upgraded future operational version is expected to improve fuel efficiency by 30%.

The test was a "defining moment for freight rail," accelerating the industry to eventual zero-emission locomotives, said Eric Gebhardt, chief technology officer at Wabtec, which developed the system at its research center near Lake Erie in northern Pennsylvania.

Battery- and hydrogen fuel cell-powered trains are among the rail industry's only viable options for reducing greenhouse gasses. Every battery locomotive that replaces a diesel will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 3,000 tons per year, Wabtec estimates.



#micropoem



mhm - 
difference between -
that moment-in-sight - 
and the after that - 
leveling-up - 
is just that - 
bigger bandwidth - 
but with -
emergents of spectral-turbulences - 


mhm - 
my style is -
what i’m comfortable with - 
my growth - well being is -
becoming comfortable with -
more complexity of choice-afford-dancing - 
more complex - 
dimensional - 
homeostasing - 
a sense of meta-social-selfing - 

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