Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) 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 will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
People who trust the media more are more knowledgeable about politics and the news. The more people trust science, the more scientifically literate they are. Even if this evidence remains correlational, it makes sense that people who trust more should get better at figuring out whom to trust. In trust as in everything else, practice makes perfect.
But then, the puzzle only deepens: if trusting provides such learning opportunities, we should trust too much, rather than not enough. Ironically, the very reason why we should trust more – the fact that we gain more information from trusting than from not trusting – might make us inclined to trust less.
When our trust is disappointed – when we trust someone we shouldn’t have – the costs are salient, and our reaction ranges from annoyance all the way to fury and despair. The benefit – what we’ve learnt from our mistake – is easy to overlook. By contrast, the costs of not trusting someone we could have trusted are, as a rule, all but invisible. We don’t know about the friendship we could have struck (if we’d let that acquaintance crash at our place). We don’t realise how useful some advice would have been (had we used our colleague’s tip about the new software application).
We should consider these hidden costs and benefits: think of what we learn by trusting, the people whom we can befriend, the knowledge that we can gain.
Giving people a chance isn’t only the moral thing to do. It’s also the smart thing to do.
The smart move: we learn more by trusting than by not trusting
Epicurus emphasised the pleasures of learning and speculating about nature and the social world, and Lucretius pointed out that what was exceptional about human beings was their creativity and handiwork. People enjoy figuring things out and getting things to work, or just getting things to look, sound and taste better, for themselves and for others. Real enjoyment arises from activities that activate concentration, that require practice and skill, and that deliver sensory enjoyment. The ability of our hands to manipulate small objects with speed and precision is unique to humans. Together with the appreciation of beauty in colour and form, this endowment adds the arts to the sciences, as the best that humans can do.
One of the tragedies of life in civilisation is that most human work doesn’t require or develop human ingenuity and artistry. Nevertheless, every human being who is not living in conditions of total cultural deprivation can activate them. The traditional pastimes of childhood were activities carried out for their own sake: crafts and puzzles, reading about animals, history, far-off places and the future, exploring the outdoors, and helping adults and younger children. Their adult equivalents are found in kitchens, sewing rooms, garages and workshops, along with libraries and lecture rooms. Making things such as pottery, jewellery, knitted, embroidered and stitched items, and fixing things around the house is a profound source of human satisfaction. In these activities, hands, eyes and mind are engaged with the material world, and it is your own taste and judgment that determine the outcome.
How to be an Epicurean
Many people have jobs that are not meaningful to them, jobs that are pursued mostly for money. Because of the common disconnect of the industrial worker from the material product of her effort, it is understandable that the focus of work easily shifts to monetary compensation.
Earnings become a symbol and cause of a successful working life. The workers’ value becomes tied to their value as measured by their financial rewards.
….the industrial experience and ethics where there is a clear hierarchy between the higher value of the desired end and the lower value of the means to get that end. In extractive, mass-industrial settings, if the result was financially desirable, then any method, even ethically questionable ones, were justified to achieve it. The end justified the means. Mindful work sees things differently. In the post-industrial, post-fossil world, we have to reconstruct the relation of means to ends. This is partly because the negative externalities that businesses create are going to be factored in the total net impact calculation of value created and/or destroyed.
Mindful and mindless work
imagine you are hiking in a valley. To reach the next valley, you need to climb a large mountain, which requires a lot of work. Now, imagine that you could tunnel through the mountain to get to the next valley, with no real effort required. This is what quantum mechanics allows, under certain conditions. In fact, if the two valleys have exactly the same shape, you would be simultaneously located in both valleys.
Chemists observe 'spooky' quantum tunneling
“You know, what people don’t understand is that AI never fires anybody. Robots don’t take your job. It’s your manager who fires you. It’s the CEO who approves an AI that eats jobs. All AI does is expedite the expeditable. Human damage and market self-interest? Totally different story — but that’s where the action really is.”
“Whatever AI can do, and whatever you can’t do, will boil down to what and why and how we choose to digitally articulate the care and the intimacy of the relationships we already have. It’s a choice.”
For my money, my colleague named the threat implicit in both The Robots Are Coming! and Inhuman Power. AI’s gravest problems aren’t technical or ethical; they’re metaphysical. As the cartoon character Pogo said decades ago, we have met the enemy — invented it, actually, if the enemy AI be — and he is us.
Intelligence Test - Anticipating an artificial world
When the immunologist De’Broski Herbert at the University of Pennsylvania looked deep inside the lungs of mice infected with influenza, he thought he was seeing things. He had found a strange-looking cell with a distinctive thatch of projections like dreadlocks atop a pear-shaped body, and it was studded with taste receptors. He recalled that it looked just like a tuft cell — a cell type most often associated with the lining of the intestines.
But what would a cell covered with taste receptors be doing in the lungs? And why did it only appear there in response to a severe bout of influenza?
One of life’s fundamental challenges is to find food that’s good to eat and avoid food that isn’t. Outside of our modern world of prepackaged food on grocery store shelves, it’s a perilous task. Taking advantage of a new type of food could mean the difference between starvation and survival, or it could mean an early death from accidental self-poisoning. Chemosensory receptors help us make this distinction. They’re so essential that even single-celled bacteria such as Escherichia coli carry a type of this receptor.
One of life’s fundamental challenges is to find food that’s good to eat and avoid food that isn’t. Outside of our modern world of prepackaged food on grocery store shelves, it’s a perilous task. Taking advantage of a new type of food could mean the difference between starvation and survival, or it could mean an early death from accidental self-poisoning. Chemosensory receptors help us make this distinction. They’re so essential that even single-celled bacteria such as Escherichia coli carry a type of this receptor.
#MetaphorsOfSelf
Cells That ‘Taste’ Danger Set Off Immune Responses
Here is a signal that speaks to the reality of governments ‘printing money’ -that Modern Monetary Theory is highlighting as a fundamental insight for a new economic paradigm. Governments always print money - the issue is who are they printing it for?
The Federal Reserve is in stealth intervention mode
What the central bank passes off as ‘funding issues’ could more accurately be described as liquidity injections to keep interest rates low
The Federal Reserve has gone into full intervention mode.
Actually, accelerated intervention mode. Not just a “mid-cycle adjustment,” as Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in July, but interventions to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every day.
What’s the crisis, you ask? After all, we live in an age of trillion-dollar market-cap companies and unemployment at 50-year lows. Yet the Fed is acting like the doomsday clock has melted as a result of a nuclear attack.
Think I’m in hyperbole mode? Far from it.
Unless you think the biggest repurchase (repo) efforts ever — surpassing the 2008 financial-crisis actions — are hyperbole
This is a good signal of the future of pharmaceuticals - and more. Closet Gene/DNA labs filled with used equipment bought on eBay already exist.
Who shrank the drug factory? Briefcase-sized labs could transform medicine
Engineers are miniaturizing pharmaceutical production in the hope of making it portable and inexpensive.
Govind Rao greets visitors to his lab just outside Baltimore with two things: a warm handshake and a chart. Almost before introductions are complete, Rao ushers guests into his windowless office at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and pulls up a graph on his battered laptop. On it, a steeply sloping line charts health spending in the United States over the past 40 years.
“It just goes up and up. How many lives is this costing?” he asks.
Rao’s solution sits in a sleek, stainless-steel briefcase on a table across from his desk. He pops the latch and flips open the lid to reveal a series of interconnected, fist-sized black boxes. They are filled with vials the size of a paper clip, fed by syringes and joined by clear plastic tubes not much thicker than a human hair. Add a source of electricity, some freeze-dried cell parts and a pinch of DNA, and the portable devices allow anyone to start making sophisticated drugs for just a few dollars. The system is called Bio-MOD, or Biologic Medications on Demand, and Rao says that it has the potential to change the direction of the precipitous curve on his laptop.
Rao isn’t alone. Teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, and hospitals in Latin America and Europe have all been experimenting with producing on-demand pharmaceuticals. Their prototype systems represent a complete reinvention of drug manufacturing.
This article has some great signals summarizing some of the emerging transformation of food production - that also transforms the carrying capacity of earth by implementing a new technological framework.
These companies are leading an alternative proteins revolution
- The alternative protein market is expanding rapidly, and could reach $140 billion within the next 10 years
- Numerous companies are now entering the market, hoping to take advantage of increased consumer interest in sustainable food production
- Critics have accused 'fake meat' of being overly processed and full of chemicals
It may sound like science fiction, but in a few short years the family dinner table may be laden with steak from a printer and other proteins produced from air, methane or volcanic microbes.
With the explosive success of vegan beef and burger substitutes developed by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, the alternative protein sector just keeps growing.
According to investment bank Barclays, alternative meat sales could reach $140 billion - or 10% of the global meat industry - within a decade, or a 10-fold increase from current levels.
This is a great signal of progress in understanding biology and how cancer arises.
Researchers unlock cancer cells' feeding mechanism, central to tumor growth
The findings could lead to new treatments by blocking tumor growth at its roots
An international team led by researchers has discovered the energy production mechanism of cancerous cells that drives the growth of the nucleolus and causes tumors to rapidly multiply. The findings could lead to the development of new cancer treatments that would stop tumor growth by cutting the energy supply to the nucleolus.
The findings, published Aug. 1 in the journal Nature Cell Biology, could lead to the development of new cancer treatments that would stop tumor growth by cutting the energy supply to the nucleolus.
"The nucleolus is the 'eye' of the cancer storm that ravages patients' bodies. Being able to control the eye would be a true game-changer in cancer treatment," said Atsuo Sasaki, PhD, associate professor at the UC College of Medicine and one of the research team's lead investigators.
This is an important signal on many levels - the concept of homeostasis depends not only on ubiquitous sensors but also how they can contribute to a ‘self-regulatory-index-of-status’. Biology provides foundational enactions of self-other regulation. The core of tasting what is self - or - not good-for-self. There is a good 7 min video.
Researchers around the world are tracing the ancient evolutionary roots that olfactory and taste receptors (collectively called chemosensory receptors or nutrient receptors) share with the immune system. A flurry of work in recent years shows that their paths cross far more often than anyone anticipated, and that this chemosensory-immunological network plays a role not just in infection, but in cancer and at least a handful of other diseases.
Cells That ‘Taste’ Danger Set Off Immune Responses
Taste and smell receptors in unexpected organs monitor the state of the body’s natural microbial health and raise an alarm over invading parasites.
When the immunologist De’Broski Herbert at the University of Pennsylvania looked deep inside the lungs of mice infected with influenza, he thought he was seeing things. He had found a strange-looking cell with a distinctive thatch of projections like dreadlocks atop a pear-shaped body, and it was studded with taste receptors. He recalled that it looked just like a tuft cell — a cell type most often associated with the lining of the intestines.
But what would a cell covered with taste receptors be doing in the lungs? And why did it only appear there in response to a severe bout of influenza?
Herbert wasn’t alone in his puzzlement over this mysterious and little-studied group of cells that keep turning up in unexpected places, from the thymus (a small gland in the chest where pathogen-fighting T cells mature) to the pancreas. Scientists are only just beginning to understand them, but it is gradually becoming clear that tuft cells are an important hub for the body’s defenses precisely because they can communicate with the immune system and other sets of tissues, and because their taste receptors allow them to identify threats that are still invisible to other immune cells.
And this is a very fascinating signal related to a new medical paradigm.
“In theory you can go after almost anything. Poisons, pathogens, viruses bacteria, anything that we can specifically bind to we can remove. So it’s a very powerful potential tool," Frodsham told The Telegraph. “When someone has a tumour you cut it out, Blood cancer is a tumour in the blood, so why not just take it out in the same way? Now we know it’s possible, it’s just a question of figuring out some of the details.”
Magnetic Tool That Removes Diseases From the Blood Set For Human Trials
A magnetic tool that can pull leukemia and malaria out of the blood is expected to start trials next year.
A UK biochemist George Frodsham has reportedly discovered a way to remove disease-causing microbes from the blood using magnets and now his company is gearing up to start human trials.
Studying magnetic nanoparticles and how they bind to cells in the body gave Frodsham the idea a few years back to use the same principles to extract viruses including leukemia, Sepsis, and malaria from the blood.
The idea is that any virus, blood cancer or infection can be removed from the body thanks to tiny magnetics, removing the need for medication or treatments like chemotherapy.
His idea turned into MediSieve, which was spun out from the University College London in 2015 to develop and commercialize magnetic blood filtration. It has raised £2.1M in equity funding and grants totaling £2.M. Now the first human trials of its technology, which is named after the company, is expected to start in 2020.
The MediSieve system was developed to integrate with existing hospital pumps, connecting to user-supplied blood lines that interface with cannulas or catheters used for venous access. The MediSieve Filter, the heart of the system, is a single-use, disposable magnetic filter which captures and retains the magnetic components. The company says a patient's total blood volume can be filtered in under an hour.
This will be oldish news - but still provides a powerful signal for the future of human health and the domestication of DNA.
Implantable artificial kidney achieves preclinical milestone
The Kidney Project, a national effort to develop an implantable bio-artificial kidney that could eliminate the need for dialysis, will announce a key milestone in a November 7, 2019 presentation at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week 2019 conference in Washington, DC.
The team will report that UC San Francisco scientists have successfully implanted a prototype kidney bioreactor containing functional human kidney cells into pigs without significant safety concerns. The device, which is about the size of a deck of cards, did not trigger an immune reaction or cause blood clots in the animals, an important milestone on the road to future human trials.
"This is the first demonstration that kidney cells can be implanted successfully in a large animal without immunosuppression and remain healthy enough to perform their function. This is a key milestone for us," said Kidney Project co-lead Shuvo Roy, Ph.D., a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine. "Based on these results, we can now focus on scaling up the bioreactor and combining it with the blood filtration component of the artificial kidney."
This is a good signal of the slow process of exploring the brain-computer-world interface. From restoration to augmentation maybe a much smaller step.
"I still can't put it into words. I mean, from being able to see absolutely nothing, it's pitch black. To all of a sudden seeing little flickers of light move around," Esterhuizen trailed off in awe as he spoke to UCLA Health.
A Brain Implant Gave This Blind Man Some Sense of Sight Again
The device, called the Orion, was implanted over the visual cortex in Esterhuizen’s brain. It converts images from a tiny video camera on a pair of sunglasses into a series of electrical pulses. The pulses stimulate electrodes in Esterhuizen’s brain, allowing him to see patterns of light, which act as visual cues.
The glasses also come with a belt that includes a button that can be pushed in order to amplify dark objects in the sun and light objects in the dark.
Currently, the implant stimulates the left side of the patient’s brain, so they can only perceive visual cues from their right field of vision. The ultimate goal is for the implant to work on both sides of the brain for a full field of vision.
This is a first hint of a possible future well known in Science Fiction.
Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time
Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.
Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it “a little surreal” when they first did it. He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result.
The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.
EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.
A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.
I think this is a weak but awesome signal of a potential future of a metabolic economy - where everything produced can be ‘metabolized’ into other uses when current uses end.
Scientists develop industrial-strength adhesive which can be unstuck in magnetic field
Researchers at the University of Sussex have developed a glue which can unstick when placed in a magnetic field, meaning products otherwise destined for landfill, could now be dismantled and recycled at the end of their life.
Currently, items like mobile phones, microwaves and car dashboards are assembled using adhesives. It is a quick and relatively cheap way to make products but, due to problems dismantling the various materials for different recycling methods, most of these products will be destined for landfill.
However, Dr. Barnaby Greenland, Lecturer in Medicinal Chemistry, working in conjunction with Stanelco RF Technologies Ltd and Prof Wayne Hayes at the University of Reading, may have found a solution.
In a new research paper, published by the European Polymer Journal, Dr. Greenland and the team describe a new type of adhesive which contains tiny particles of metal. When passed through an alternating electromagnetic field, the glue melts and products simply fall apart.
The adhesive works with plastic, wood, glass and metal and in terms of strength, is comparable to those currently used in industry.
Dr. Greenland said: "In as little as 30 seconds, we can unstick items using a relatively weak magnetic field.
A great signal of the continuing improvements of generating renewable power.
Superconducting wind turbine chalks up first test success
The EcoSwing consortium designed, developed, and manufactured a full-size superconducting generator for a 3.6 megawatt wind turbine, and field-tested it in Thyborøn, Denmark.
They report their results in the IOP Publishing journal Superconductor Science and Technology.
Corresponding author Anne Bergen, from the University of Twente, The Netherlands, said: "Wind turbine size has grown significantly over the last few decades. However, today's technology has trouble keeping up with the trend towards ever-increasing unit power levels.
the team employed rare-earth barium copper oxide (ReBCO) high-temperature superconducting generators. These require a smaller amount of rare-earth materials than PM machines, resulting in a lower cost. Superconductors can also carry high current densities, which results in more power-dense coils and a lower weight.
I wonder if any great poet has ever written an ODE to the Toilet? Surely this is a device that has transformed the world and enable great increases in health, wellbeing, comfort and convenience. But it can be improved.
“Our coating can be applied by simply spray-coating or wiping directly onto the surface, and it is very easy to apply,” “Household users can apply the coating by themselves.”
This slippery new coating could make toilets less filthy
The sprayable coating could also help reduce wastewater
A slippery new coating could make the crappiest place in your home a little cleaner. Developed by researchers at Penn State University, this two-part product promises to keep your toilet bowl clean, stink-free, and — potentially — set the stage for toilets to use less water in the future.
Worldwide, about 37 billion gallons of fresh water are flushed down toilets every day, say the inventors of the new product who published the results of their work this week in the journal Nature Sustainability. The reason we send so much water down the drain? It takes a lot of water to get rid of the bulk of our waste. Or as the authors put it in the paper: “human faeces is viscoelastic and sticky in nature, causing it to adhere to conventional surfaces.”
If people could make toilets more slippery, less water would be needed to get the results of those bowel movements moving down the drain. That’s where the new liquid-entrenched smooth surface (LESS) comes in. LESS consists of two sprayable coatings that can be applied to carbon steel, ceramics, or other hard surfaces. The first spray dries into thin, hair-like structures so small that they aren’t visible to the naked eye. The second is a lubricant that coats those “hairs,” making waste, water, and even bacteria slide off easily.
This is a great signal about the power of visuals to enable us to think the unthinkable.
How to turn the complex mathematics of vector calculus into simple pictures
Feynman diagrams revolutionized particle physics. Now mathematicians want to do the same for vector calculus.
Back in 1948, the journal Physical Review published a paper entitled “Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics” by a young physicist named R.P. Feynman at Cornell University. The paper described a new way to solve problems in electrodynamics using matrices. However, it is remembered today for a much more powerful invention—the Feynman diagram, which appeared there in print for the first time.
Feynman diagrams have had a huge impact in physics. They are pictorial representations of the mathematics that describe the interaction between subatomic particles. Mathematically, each interaction is an infinite series, so even simple interactions between particles are fantastically complex to write down in this way.
Feynman’s genius was to represent these series with simple lines in a graphical format, allowing scientists to think about particle physics in new and exciting ways.
Feynman and others immediately began to extend their ideas using this graphical shorthand. Indeed, the American physicist Frank Wilcjek, who worked with Feynman in the 1980s, once wrote: “The calculations that eventually got me a Nobel Prize in 2004 would have been literally unthinkable without Feynman diagrams.“
… every physics and engineering undergraduate spends many happy hours struggling with the mathematics and the arcane notation that it requires. The problem is that vector fields are intricate entities—they assign a single vector to every point in three-dimensional space and can themselves be representations of more complex mathematical objects called differentiable manifolds. So at its very simplest, a vector field can be an infinite list of vectors.
Here is how to create 3D visuals that can be felt. The world of mixed reality (including digitally connected xxx experiences) is emerging ever nearer. There is a 5 min video illustrating the current state.
Star Wars-style 3D images created from single speck of foam
Ultrasonic speakers steer tiny bead to generate displays that you can touch and hear.
“It’s an elegant and exciting platform,” says Daniel Smalley, a physicist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who last year unveiled a similar technique, using lasers to steer around a fleck of cellulose to produce images. Until now, few physicists thought it would be possible to use sound to move a bead fast enough to create such a display, he says. In August, Tatsuki Fushimi, a physicist at the University of Bristol, UK, and his collaborators became the first to show that it was feasible. But their bead took longer to trace out shapes, meaning that only images smaller than 1 centimetre across could appear as a single, continuous object2. The Sussex team’s work is “a piece of engineering that makes us believe things we didn’t think were possible,” says Smalley.
The acoustic device, described in Nature on 13 November, is the latest example of a 3D-image-generation technology known as volumetric display, which differs in fundamental ways from technologies such as holograms, virtual reality and stereoscopes. Those more-familiar approaches use tricks of the light to create the illusion of depth, and can be life-sized and photorealistic. But holograms can be seen only from certain angles, virtual reality and stereoscopes require headgear, and all these techniques can cause eye strain. Free-space volumetric displays, by contrast, use lasers, electric fields, fog projections and other approaches to create truly 3D images that viewers can see from any vantage point. In that way, they’re the closest any display technology has come to Princess Leia’s SOS message in the 1977 film Star Wars.
