Cranial Nerve Zero: Sex and the Secret Nerve

Now this is entirely news to me! Despite 6 years of undergraduate med school study, and two postgraduate degrees- including one in which i spent quite a bit of time learning about neurology- i have NEVER heard about Cranial Nerve Zero. I wish i was in a band because that's what i'd call it.

It apparently usually gets ripped off when the brain is removed from the skull so anatomists often miss it- but it has been described intermittently over the last few hundred years! There's a fascinating article about it in the latest Scientific American Mind magazine- particularly interesting is its postulated role in sensing pheremones.

Actually the rest of the magazine is really really good and includes fun stuff like: differences between Bonobos and Chimps, The Psychopathology of Paedophilia, The Science of Orgasm (using what i like to call the Heavy-PET Scan Studies), Arrested Development in Rapist Orangutans, Genetics of Homosexuality etc etc. I wonder if paedophilia drove the evolution of human neoteny?

Would have been even better to include general stuff on the theories of the evolution of sexual reproduction, and the theory that the brain/mind evolved as a 'conspicuous display' on the basis of sexual selection. I'm assuming these theories are dreamed up late at night by Geek Biologists- to reassure themselves that Geekiness= Chiciness= Sexiness.

If true though- everything really IS about sex- and not just the 90% of our salacious western culture that is so OBVIOUSLY about sex. Great art, poetry, literature, greed, war- it may all just ultimately be about getting laid.

What would the world be like if there was no need for lust? If humans reproduced parthenogenetically like certain species of lizards? What if you could just 'pinch off' a new little you? What would motivate you to get up in the morning?

To find out- you'd need to inteview thousands of really extraordinarily good-looking guys for whom getting laid is no problem to find out what life is like. Personally i've always had to struggle against the demotivating effects of my extreme physical attractiveness.

The Evil Virus that Lives Inside Me

To paraphrase Khalil Gibran (aka "The Prophet"): Our genomes are not really our genomes- they come through us, but not from us.

Our genomes are not even all 'human' - about 8% is 'virus scar' - otherwise known as HERV's "Human Endogenous Retroviruses". This DNA got there (for example) when an HIV-like virus infected the ovaries of a little squirrel-like creature a few hundred million years ago. That squirrel evolved into me, you and everyone we know.

Once this viral DNA gets in, it doesn't just stay put- it stamps itself all over the genome, making thousands of copies of itself and buggering up lots of other stuff. Like a badly graffitied library book - sometimes the meaning of the text is lost or changed.

Most of this viral DNA is just fossilized "junk"- but some (previously) viral genes have been coopted by our cells to make placentas- they allow the fusion of primitive placental cells known as "trophoblasts". Unfortunately, some also seem to be pretty good at helping good cells turn into invasive cancers.

Over the aeons, the viral DNA has become dilapidated- degraded by mutation. The genes that normally allow a HERV virus to escape from a cell are now defunct. These antique viruses are therfore trapped inside us- unable to escape and become infectious particles.

That is until 2007 when some guys decided to re-create an infectious version of HERV-K : a virus whose last outbreak was over a million years ago.

An extinct human pathogen- dormant but surviving in a crippled state through geological timescales is resurrected. We have no immunity. Bang! it's the end of the world (yet again).

What happened to "ethics committees"? Hasn't anyone read Greg Bear's novel "Darwin's Radio"?

There's a Photo of You on the Moon Too!!!

In the 70's some astronaut left a family portrait on the moon. How cool would it be knowing that , whenever you looked up at the moon at night, there'd be a picture of you there looking back. Seriously cool.

Some company is now offering me (and you) this same 'once in a lifetime' chance. ... only this time it'll be a digital image of your family, along with ten trillion other strings of zeros and ones. And there not really even zeros OR ones- there just a long string of things that can be in one state or another- magnetic fields, pits in disc. Lets say it's a DVD or a Blu-Ray (kudos Sony) disc that gets dumped on the moon. Let's not consider it littering.

How cool would it NOT be -knowing that whenever you looked up at the moon at night, there'd be a series of microscopic pits in a disc that correspond to your family? Hmmm.

When i say 'correspond'- you'll of course need to know what format the image is in to actually decode it. Will it matter to you if it is a JPEG, a TIFF or a BMP? It should do- because that list of binary digits will need to be completely different. Otherwise it'll be like being a blind kid whose astronaut father leaves a photo on the moon: if you've never seen a photo, and never seen the moon- imagining both together is probably going to leave you less than satisfied.

Here's what i propose instead of all this- and it doesn't involve littering:

Since it is both the data and the format algorithm that TOGETHER generate 'meaning'.... why not use data that's already on the surface of the moon? Lets say you generate a long list of numbers that correspond to all the craters' diameters, longitude and latitude. You then convert these into a very long series of zeros and ones (or elephants and telephones).

Then, you hire an earthbound mathematician, and tell him to think up a complex equation, 'format' or algorithm that will convert your new data set into a beautiful 8 x 6 color portrait of your family.

Viola! There's a photo of you on the moon- and there always was.

OK- so there's also the complete works of Shakespeare and all your ex-girlfriends' telephone numbers- but that's not the point.

The Evil Twin that Lives Inside Me

Your genome is like your genetic 'fingerprint' - everyone's is individual. But it's not really that simple.

Each of your cells contains hundreds of mitochondria that produce energy needed to power it. These started off about 4 billion years ago as free-living bacteria that got eaten but not digested by one of our single-celled ancestors. They have their own DNA - and thus their very own genome. (although some of these genes have jumped over to the nuclear chromosomes). This genome is also technically "yours" ... in this case it is passed down solely along the maternal lineage as sperm don't donate the father's miochondria to the fertilized egg. All of us have "Eve's" mitochondria that's been slowly mutating down the aeons.

In some cells of your body, the genome has been mixed around- some bits deleted, rearranged. The white blood lymphocytes that make antibodies (B cells) do this as they mature in your bone marrow. In this way, your body can manufacture zillions of different types of antibody than otherwise would be possible. The genome in one of your B cells is probably different to the genome in your liver or skin.

Here's where it gets more interesting: When you were a fetus, some of your stem cells managed to get into your mother's circulation- and vice versa. It's now been shown that these can survive at least 38 years! It's also theoretically possible that some of these cells could find their way into the circulation of your younger siblings. If you're a woman, it's even possible that your body contains your mother's genome, your grandmother's genome etc etc. - along with those of all your children.

This situation is known as micro-chimerism.. where there exists a relatively tiny amount of non-self DNA. It may explain some auto-immune disorders. I wonder if children born of 3 parents (sperm, egg, surrogate mother) will be shown to have any immunological differences given the (usual) complete genomic dissimilarity between the surrogate mother and the offspring. Who knows- maybe it might trigger autoimmune disease in the surrogate.

Pediatric dermatologists are often confronted by children born with unusual variations in their skin. Sometimes, there can be too much pigment or not enough, too many blood vessels or too few, too many hairs or too few. There are even conditions that cause acne in certain areas but not others.

The patterning of these changes is often described as streaky, whorled or marbled. It is presumed that they follow the lines of embryonic skin development ("Blashko's lines) and are thus termed "Blashkoid". The idea is that there is an error in cell division in one of the fetus' skin stem cells leading to two genomically distinct populations.

My feeling is that this probably happens all the time - but that most genetic changes are 'invisible' to dermatologists. It's only when the color changes that the condition becomes noticeable.

But- (this is REALLY COOL) it is also possible for 2 non-identical twin embryos to fuse together to form a single individual made of two distinct genomes. (A tetragametic chimera). Actually this sort of thing happens in marmoset monkeys all the time (see video below).

When a male & female embryo fuse, the results can be obvious at birth with a form of true hermaphroditism- both ova and testes present.

When 2 twin sister embryos fuse - or 2 twin brothers- you might never know- perhaps it happened to you. Your skin might show subtle whorls of differential pigmentation.

If you're a woman having fertility treatment and they put 2 embryo's in but only 1 comes out.... maybe you should check they haven't fused!

There are 2 situations where you might find out by accident: custody battles and organ transplant workups.

There has even been a case of fusion on an unfertilized ova, with an embryo forming a chimera of a child and (half) his own mother! (a trigametic chimera)

"Gravity Waves Goodbye" or "Scatological Eschatology".

In the following analogy my brain is compared to a goose, my high-school exam results are fois gras, and physics is the 'gavage'. Now read on!

When i was at high school being force-fed dry physics equations -( Newton's laws etc) i remember thinking : "..but what actually is gravity"?

The equations i learned described how things moved but i wanted to know what gravity actually was. What ACTUALLY IS IT? How is it possible that I (by this I i mean my body not my 'spirit')- that i am connected to EVERY OTHER THING in the observable universe?

The billions of trillions of stars in the night sky tug me upwards WHILST those on the daytime side of the earth pull me downwards. "Here i am stuck in the middle with you". I wonder if it is possible to estimate the total pull of all that stuff up there- what's the gravitational attraction of half the universe from here? It's pretty far away but there is an awful lot of it. (Please forward this blog entry to anyone with a physics degree).

I am attracted to my cat, your cat, your brother's cat,you and your children, that pen that you dropped in the car that slid between the door and the seat- right now i am exerting a force over that pen that reduces by the square of the distance between it and me.

Why does nobody else seem to find this utterly incredible? If it was discovered yesterday it would all over the papers. But no- it's Britney, Britney, Britney, Britney, Heath.

Honestly, even the serious "news" is a glorified version of "he said this, she said that". Nobody will remember presidents or pop-stars in a thousand years. Nobody will care who said what to who(m?) - but humanity will ALWAYS remember Einstein and Newton and that other guy i can't remember- what's him name.. Laplace? Kepler? Something.

They will be remembered as (to paraphrase Newton) the giants who have an infinite regress of mini-giants standing on their shoulders so as to see further (it's giants all the way down by the way).

Unless you are a scientist (and i don't mean a medical doctor) you should consider yourself a support network for the smart people. I am here in case there's a local Einstein with a rash. Britney exists to entertain the scientist with her heartfelt passionate music in his/her time away from the lab.

Nobody will remember us- not even our own family after 3 generations. That's all the fame we've got to look forward to.
"Granny- who is that JPEG of?"
"Oh, that was my great grandfather... he lived at the turn of the century when blogging had just been invented.".

I was told "just learn the equations". So I stopped asking questions and got 91% in physics which got me into medical school. After decades of thinking about it i still don't really get it. Maybe nobody before Einstein got it... and it probably came to him in a flash whilst daydreaming between patents. (i daydream between patients but just get more and more confused). The internet isn't helping.

It seems it's often the most obvious things that take the longest to get 'discovered' by science - think about the discovery of "air", "sleep", "consciousness". What about 'plate tectonics'? .. it's pretty clear to a 3 year old looking at a map that the continents fit together like a jigsaw puzzle- yet it took till 1960 for that theory to be generally accepted.

Ok... so don't think of gravity as a "force" between two objects. Think (apparently) about a bowling ball on a trampoline. In this case, the 3-D universe is represented by the 2-D surface of the trampoline. When placed gently upon it's surface, a bowling ball indents it.

The more mass an object has, the more it warps the fabric (of trampoline spacetime). When you place a tennis ball at the edge of the trampoline, it rolls downhill until it hits the bowling ball-(or might orbit it a bit until friction slows it down). Viewed from above, it would seem like the bowling ball is attracting the tennis ball by some mysterious force. (Bowlingballation).

More interestingly, imagine throwing a bowling ball on to the surface- you can imagine ripples in the trampoline spreading outwards from the epicentre like ripples on a pond.

These waves are analagous to "gravitational waves". They are waves of space that alternately shrink and stretch space and everything in it. A wave like this passing through a round ball - or even a drawing of a circle - would stretch it back and forth. Gravity wave detectors all over the world are poised waiting to detect this wobble.

Even more interestingly, gravity waves radiate energy away from the objects that emit them... i guess this is like vacuum friction!

N.B. "gravity" the not the same thing as a "gravity wave". A massive stationary object still exerts a force of 'gravity' but does not emit any gravity waves. Gravity is a static warping of spacetime- a Gravity wave propagates this warp.. i think.

Gravity itself also travels at "the speed of light".. although it could also be said that light travels at the speed of gravity. Whatever it is, it is the cosmic speed limit- nothing can ever travel faster.

What this means is that if the sun suddenly disappeared, the earth would continue nicely on it's elliptical orbit for eight whole minutes before the lack of gravity 'registered' and we were flung out into space. (The light would go off at the same time.).

When i first read about this, i couldn't stop thinking about it. What if it had already happened 7.5 minutes ago? Presumably, we could live in the dark burning fossil fuels for a bit- but my guess is the planet's temperature would drop within a few hours to freeze everything solid.

I guess these morbid eschatological thoughts of mine (see "The End of the World") are the atheist analogy to thinking about death and "hell". My scatological eschatological thoughts entail thinking about "Fucking Hell".

This excellent, informative video explains it all:

Beautiful is Average

This girl is not really real- she is a composite of about 30 different women. She is significantly more beautiful than any of her constituent faces. If you don't believe me you can mix and match your own faces at "Face Research". (Beware- this is unusually addictive!).

If you login and upload your own photo, you can manipulate the image in all sorts of cool ways: e.g. 'mate' yourself with others and see what your offspring would look like had your partner been (for example) a Mohican, African etc. I'm hoping to have a child with Angelina Jolie and will post him/her when available.

Apparently there is good research to support the idea that averaged faces are judged to be more attractive than individuals... contrary to the 'common sense' view that places 'beauty' at one end of a spectrum. These faces however, seem to lose all wrinkles, smile lines, blemishes etc. The averaged hairdo's and clothing give them 'auras'...the end result is that they always end up looking somewhat ethereal.

Maybe this principle applies to other aspects of life: e.g. the wisdom of crowds? (why 250 million dumbass voters might actually pick the best candidate).

Perhaps an averaged house, dress, symphony, novel would be better than any bespoke individual?

Lavazza Girls!

I have seen this ad for Lavazza coffee quite a few times over the last few years... it's one of the only ads i've ever seen (and i must have seen billions) that i keep thinking about...

Firstly- what's going on? Well, obviously, a very attractive brunette air-hostess has 'abandoned ship' in mid-flight. Why? She is a terrorist sleeper agent from Al Qaida. It is 9/11.

Having activated the bomb- she dons her parachute and jumps out the emergency exit- the sudden depressurization sucking many through the aperture with her to fall cartwheeling to their deaths.

She has just a minute before this to make a good strong cup of coffee (Lavazza of course!) and grab her handbag. Oh - and lets not forget the saucer and spoon.

But boy- she is a sexy terrorist. Phew! Look at those old-fashioned stockings & suspenders. She's probably already synchronized her rolex and is meeting her contact on the ground in a few minutes. Is coffee-breath sexy? No. That's why she needs the suspenders.

I think i've always had a 'thing' for girls from the 30's... strange but that they're all over 100 now or dead.

Many years ago, in my 1st year as a medical student when stonewash was new, and i was still wearing hi-top basketball sneakers - i met a librarian (i returning books) in what was called the "Biological Sciences Library" before it was knocked over.

This creaky old hot wooden building was the last place i expected to find a very cute girl -librarian dressed up in what appeared to be a bell-bottomed sailor suit - complete with a 30's deco hairdo and a curl over her left eye. A vision. I had just discovered 'Swing' music via Benny Goodman at that point. (My Grandfather's old 78's).

In my fantasy she would berate me for returning my books late- it would end in a struggle that would by chance approximate my lips with hers. We would discuss the Dewy Decimal System late into the night.

Since then i've always had a fondness for the 30's - despite WWII!* The music, the design, but mostly the way women looked then. I feel nostalgic for a period 40 years before i was born.

I think that's why i really like this:

p.s. it seems Lavazza has been doing great photography for decades. Check here.
* On that note- very funny is Comedy Central's "I Love The 30's"

Theodicy Idiocy: The Problem of Evil

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is the world so F%&^ed up? Why does God want there to be acne, evil dictators, global warming, bad television? Lets face it- He's not doing a great job.

Here are the qualities of God as He is traditionally reckoned:

* Omniscient (all knowing)
* Omnipotent (all powerful)
* Benevolent (all good)

The existence of evil requires that one of these 3 is not true BUT if this is the case, it pretty much excludes God from being God by definition (reductio ad absurdum). God and 'evil' cannot logically coexist.

One might argue that we mere mortals cannot understand why (for example) the birth of a severely retarded child is in God's best interests. Great minds have contorted themselves through the ages and arrived at a number of complex theoretical structures to explain away the problem of evil. Many require one to believe a large number of other unbelievable things in order to square the circle.

I prefer Laplace's comments (to Napoleon) when asked whether he thought God existed he said: "I have no need for that hypothesis.".

Eta Carinae : The End of the World

There are a few interesting things about this star - visible mostly in the southern hemisphere skies.

The first is that it "exploded" in the 1800's - ejecting mass equivalent to 10 times the mass of our sun- and briefly becoming the 2nd brightest star in the night sky.

It didn't however, completely destroy itself by becoming a supernova- however astronomers believe this could happen at any time- e.g. 4pm next tuesday.

When it does, the process will lead to the formation of a black hole and release an incredible amount of energy in the form of gamma rays. If these hit us, they will sterilize the Earth by destroying our protective ozone layer entirely.

We will have no warning.

The other problem is that this thing is 7500 light years away- which means that it has probably already happened. The gamma rays are on their way. Ciao!

link here to Astronomycast podcast about gamma ray bursts.

Un-Methylated Spirits

Our 'nurtured' genes determine who we are. Our DNA gene codes for an RNA message that gets printed out into a string of protein that gets folded up in three dimensions to become a little bit of bio-nano-technology. This is why we are tall or short, fat or thin, blue-eyed or brown.

You would think that it would not matter if a chromosome comes from your mother or your father- that there would be no way to tell- after all they simply consist of chunks of DNA. Female mice have 2 copies of their X chromosome- but it is ALWAYS the paternal X that is switched off. This 'tagging' is known as genetic imprinting- and the trick is performed using methylation.

There are 2 "epigenetic" syndromes that are essentially the reverse of each other- both are due to problems with genes on an area of chromosome 15.

Prader-Wili syndrome occurs when neither segment has paternal imprinting- (e.g. the mother's contribution is present, but the father's has been deleted). These children are characteristically obese, hypogonadal and have some intellectual impairment- although interestingly tend to be very good at jigsaw puzzles!

Angelman's Syndrome occurs, by contrast when there is no maternal imprinting present (e.g. the father's contribution is present, but the mother's has been deleted). These children were initially described as "Happy Puppets". They are often affectionate, verbose, and crave human contact.

But there is more. Genes can be tagged "maternal" or "paternal"- but methylation occurs for many other reasons too. A diet high in "methylation" precursors in rats can change the expression of a lot of genes.

Here is the REALLY interesting bit: If methylation occurs in the cells destined to become the sperm or ova- then these traits become hereditary- at least for a few generations. In other words, this represents a form of "Lamarckian" (vs Darwinian) evolution- the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Offspring of female rats fed folic acid had brown fur due to methylation of the Agouti gene. Offspring of rats who were not fed the supplements had yellow fur- AND a tendency to diabetes and obesity!

You are not what you eat- you are what your mother ate! It makes me wonder- what if the folate supplement that reduces the incidence of neural tube defects and leukemia in our children has more sinister late methylation effects?

What would a genetically normal but completely un-methylated human look like?

Detailed article here, New York Times article here.

Global Boiling: Why Worry?

Unlike Prophet Gore, i have little faith in my own species of murderous apes to prevent global warming. We are despairingly short-sighted.

The engine of capitalism has given us so much freedom, but the downside of the greed that is required to grease it's wheels is environmental catastrophe. Science won't save us- and nor will blogging! People just don't believe in science. What's needed is a kooky new reinterpretation of eco-Jesusism.

I had thought that we'd run out of fossil fuels before we could do too much damage- but now it seems there are trillions of barrels worth of methane trapped in ice crystals (methane hydrates or clathrates) at the bottom of the ocean. If the methane escapes- we'll get a runaway greenhouse effect: the so called "Clathrate Gun". If we burn it for fuel, we'll generate so much CO2 we'll probably get the same effect.

So now I think we are essentially flucked. The end is nigh.

I suspect many prominent environmentalists are privately very pessimistic and are in therapy - but paint a brave facade of optimism: "YES-You CAN make a difference!".

There's just not much real point circling with a "We are Doomed!" placard- you might as well go find a nice beach to sit on and read a book and wait for the end to come. I've heard it said that one good thing about global warming (and rising sea levels) is that we'll all own beachfront property one day!

It should really be re-branded as "Global Boiling" - 'warm' makes it sound so nice- you can now grow tomatoes in Finland- so what's wrong with that? Perhaps rebadging it as an "Unavoidable Disasterous Global Dying Event" would help.

No government can think in terms of the "long now"... and i don't know if anybody is taking those crackpots at the "Long Now Foundation" seriously. Don't get me wrong- i love the LNF and those crackpots are my heroes (i even subscribe to their podcasts).

We absolutely must build a clock to last a zillion years - so when the cockroaches evolve to sentience they will know what time it is.

Their roach-o-pologists will probably need to go scuba diving to find our artifacts (rising sea levels again)... perhaps they will think of us as we think of the ancient Egyptians .. until they dig up a few fossilized roach baits .... eh? i wonder what this was used for?

Really, we should get 'over' ourselves- sure we're going to auto-extinctify ourselves and lots of polar bears etc- but there have been many mass extinctions before. The largest one ever occured 251 million years ago and wiped out 96% of all marine life, and 70% of all life on land. Do we weep for those lost trilobites? I doubt it. In any case, when the sun expands at the end of it's life, the earth will be sterilized, shortly before being literally engulfed by it. But don't worry, the ultimate heat-death of the universe is coming.. and nothing will be able to survive that.

It's All in the Mind

“By convention there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void”

Democritus

“I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated”

Galileo Galilei, 1623

“For the rays, to speak properly, are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that color.”

Isaac Newton Optics 1704

Pain? I tell patients just before i stick needles in them: "It's all in the mind!". I chuckle to myself ... it's an "in" joke - but only in for myself.

(I do the same things when i have to examine an anus (rarely) i mutter under my breath an exhalatory whispered "arsehole!" - and i think about my home extension/mortgage - this helps me put up with it. Doctors are human too- we're just trying to get by.)

Anyway- the joke is that EVERYTHING is 'all in the mind'- love, pain, memory, music, art, warmth and color. There really isn't much outside our subjective experience of the universe.

Take color- just varying wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. You get the same thing if you grab a fridge magnet and wave it up and down (you just get VERY low frequency light). Newton hit upon this idea after squishing his eyeballs and sticking pins in his eyes to fire up his retinae - producing colored scintillations.

The separate 'colors' we see as distinct- but they probably are more like shades of gray in reality! We see green-ness as qualitatively different to redness- but really, there is only a quantitative difference in the wavelengths. Also interesting is why we percieve a 'color wheel' to make sense- in other words- why should red be able to merge seamlessly with blue (through purple)? .. when these are like black and white- at opposite ends of the wavelength spectrum.

Below the wavelength of red is (obviously) infrared... but what is not so obvious is why we perceive this as radiant heat, rather than a new color. The retina gives up and the sense organs in the skin take over. Without humans (or other living things) to feel the 'warmth' from the sun- this would just be yet another short segment of EM radiation.

Red objects aren't really "red". Red objects simply hold on to all colors except red, which they reflect. I wonder, given the vogue for black roof tiles- could there be a specific "black" color that absorbs all visible light, but reflects the infra-red... i.e. a "cool black"? Would save lots of money on air-conditioning. Maybe if you could spray whatever metallic film they put in "low-e" window glass on top? Maybe glossy black roofs are better than matt ones?

... After an exhaustive googling: found this BASF low-e paint- you could paint the interior of your house and stay warm in winter!

When the Robots Take Over They Will Kill Us.

This video (from New Zealand digi-folk duo 'Flight of the Conchords') depicts life post Kurzweilian 'Singularity'- the humans are dead, robots rule the world. There are also no elephants it is true- but then again, there is also no cruelty to elephants. Ha! Similar arguments can be made about vegetarianism and the proposed extinction of domesticated animals- (see Peter Singer: Animal Liberation). Is it better to have lived and suffered, than to never have lived at all? I digress.

Ray Kurweil is an amazing guy- though not quite as amazing as he thinks he is. He thinks that by swallowing 45 dietary supplements a day he has warded off diabetes. Ray thinks he's discovered the fountain of youth. He needs it - because he wants to live forever- because he doesn't want to leave the world without our Ray.

He's written several books- interesting ones- but ones that contain an enormous amout of stuffing. His basic premise is that once computers (artificial intelligence) can self-replicate, an incredible positive feedback loop will begin that rapidly will allow AI's to outsmart humans. This he calls the 'singularity'.

I guess "We'll make great pets". As 'Porno for Pyro's' asked :"Will there be another race to come along and take over for us?". Although i think they were thinking about Martians.

"Who knows- maybe the robots will have to get rid of us for our own utilitarian good... wait didn't i see all this in Battlestar Galactica? If the robots look like fembot Tricia Helfer, sign me up for a brain upload.

Today i read an article about Alex Lemaire- an amazing human 'computer'- able to perform incredible mental arithmetic (or is it algebra)- getting the 13th root (i hesitate to make a cheap joke about my 13th root).

He has one of those rare savant minds that can visualize numbers... they have an intrinsic 'meaning' to him- as different to each other as blue is to red for us. No effort is required to process this information- it just 'is'. I have heard a description of this type of calculation (by someone who does it) as akin to flying over a landscape of numbers- when you 'arrive' at your destination, you simply look around and 'read' the scenery. People who can do this are often as mystified as anybody else as to the underlying mechanism/process (although perhaps not entirely in this case).

Interestingly, Alex is completing his PhD in Artifical Intelligence- but says what he does is "AI in reverse".

In other words, he 'programs' his brain to perform certain algorithms and act like a digital computer.

At the moment he's only able to do this with certain mathematical stuff- but he hopes to be able to find a way of 'programming' his brain to be a 'general purpose' computer.

Once he can do this, he'll be able to simulate his entire consciousness INSIDE his own brain! He will have meta-consciousness, although the 2nd level one might be thinking at a slower speed. Where will it end? An infinite regress of meta-meta-meta consciousnesses-esses-esses? Here are his phone numbers- you can ask him yourself- but you'll need to speak French: téléphone: mobile +33(0)628195447 +33(0)326780835.

I'm Dishillusioned!

Dishillusion: (n) the false belief that you have finished washing the dishes - when in fact you have left a few bits of dirty crockery and cutlery on the dining table. (see also Dishappointed).

... just in case you had any qualms about our level of household hygeine- let me reassure you.. the plates here are so clean you could almost eat off them.

The Nautical Casimir : A Mysterious Vacuum Attraction Explained

If you put 2 thin plates very close together in a vacuum, they are attracted to each other- this is known as the Casimir effect. The odd thing is- this attraction is not due to gravity (which is much much weaker) or electrostatic charge. This attractive force seems to come for free - out of nowhere! Creepy.

I've been fascinated by this since i first heard about it a few years ago- but have never been able to understand the mechanism behind it. What i needed was an anaolgy nearly totally devoid of physics- and now i've found one..as part of a really interesting lecture on "nothingness" by Dr John Barrow- i.e. the history of zero, vacuums etc.

Here is the best bit:

"I discovered a few years ago a wonderful nautical version of this (Casimir) force. Back in the 1820s, the French Navy produced a handbook of advice to their sailors, and one of the pieces of advice to captains is rather extraordinary. There’s no reason for the advice, it’s just based on experience, and the experience was that if you had two large ships and you were sailing in a strong swell but there were not high winds, then if the boats were to come quite close together, 30 or 40 yards close to one another, then the captain should set down small boats full of 20 or 30 men, and they whould attach lines and pull the boats apart, because experience showed that once the boats which were gently swaying together got closer than about 30 or 40 yards, they would be pulled together and their riggings would become entwined and there would be disaster. If you calculate this, you find that it’s exactly the same effect in the large, that you get an out of phase generation of waves between the boats, so the crests of one wave match the troughs of the other, so it’s in effect there is no wave motion between the two boats, but the waves coming in and rebounding off the outside push the boats together. Mathematically, it’s exactly the same type of effect, but not with quantum waves, just with classical waves. In fact, a little mathematics shows you, if you have two ships that weigh about 700 tons or so, then a couple of small boats with 20 or 30 men will be able to overcome the force that pulls them together, so it’s a nautical Casimir effect.".

So... Could this vacuum energy from empty space power a perpetual motion machine and solve the worlds energy and climate crises forever? No. Just like a brick falling to Earth gravitationally- you'd have to keep pulling the two Casimir plates apart again and again- and each time you did so, you'd use up just the same amount of energy created in the first place.

Dr Barrow's other lectures look equally interesting- here's a list of 'em.

Malaria was a Plant

When you look at an elephant and a banana side by side, it's obvious that one is an animal, and one is a plant- and you're unlikely to be able to kill the elephant with a schpritz of "roundup".

When you look at unicellular organisms however, it's hard to tell. Presumably, if there are chloroplasts present - it's a plant. If not, it's an animal.

Chloroplasts started off life as free living cyanobacteria-like bugs. In a warm tidal pool a few billion years ago, one was gobbled up by a host "plant" cell. These chloroplasts were not digested, but continued live and reproduce inside the original cell- forming the first eukaryotic algae.

As it happens, the bug that causes Malaria -Plasmodium- contains a broken down old chloroplast (an Apicoplast) that doesn't do any photosynthesizing. (Not much sunlight inside a mosquito or a human red blood corpuscle).

The Apicoplast is however, needed for the parasite to invade new cells. Even more fascinating- common herbicides that are generally pretty non-toxic to humans seem to stop the Apicoplast from working.

Given that Malaria kills a few million African kids per year- a little bit of herbicide might do a lot of good.

Romulus

I wonder if the myth could possibly be true- most children reared by animals have great difficulty learning language, walking upright and integrating in any way back into society- much less founding one of the world's greatest civilizations.

Oliver Sacks has written about such children. Most seem to have been reared by dogs, although monkeys come a close second. Sacks talks about a particular "wolf-boy" who was able to learn a language fluently and then describe what it was like to be "pre-linguistic"... there was no such thing as "A Tree", only "The Tree". It is interesting that the capacity for logical thought appears to require the presence of language- of some sort (he includes sign language and algebra).

There is a story attributed to an ancient Egyptian pharoah who decided to find out what the original human language was by raising a few children in complete isolation from birth. It turns out they don't say very much. Unfortunately, these results were not published in the Journal of Negative Results- and the experiment had to be repeated in 1211 AD by a German Emperor. This is analogous to my idea of rearing 2 children in (separated) isolation for 38 years. Following this, they are shown both a Porsche and a Hyundai and asked to say which they feel is the sexier car.

Pork Chop or Pet? Our Animal Ambivalence.

I have just finished reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivores Dilemma" ... and i agree (and have always felt) that it's fascinating how we draw a line around some animals as if to say "You are a pet, and we will not eat you."

He points out that most pigs are probably more intelligent than the average dog- yet we are quite happy to eat them without a second thought. If you're "kosher" i think you're only allowed to eat pork at certain restaurants.

(The Chinese however do have the "Chow Chow" breed - which was bred to actually be "Chow"- although according to wikipedia this is actually not how it got it's (English) name! )

I think that ethically we should separate the killing of animals from the actual eating of meat. I don't actually think there is any good argument not to eat meat per se- but unfortunately you usually have to kill animals to get it. As Homer put it "If God wanted us to be vegetarian, why did he make animals out of meat?". (Also in that episode Lisa has a nightmare in which she is chided by a pig: "You don't eat our meat, but you glue with our feet!"). Hopefully we will be able to grow enough twitching clumps of cloned striated cow muscle before long- and then we can all stop feeling guilty.(see In-Vitro Meat). Once this technology matures, we'll able to order up any sort of meat or meat combination- lion, elephant, whale, human. Cannibal-themed restaurants will open- you'll have to be careful if you order a 'Bloody Mary'.

Pollan argues that we should eat meat from animals that have led a 'good life'- doing whatever it is that's in their instinct to do- graze on grass in a field, rather than be stuck in a feedlot prison eating corn and being pumped full of antibiotics. Yes, it's true that without us there wouldn't be domesticated farm animals. Yes, without B12 we die. Yes, it is the "instinct" of a feral human to eat meat..... but even so we should try to be nice to the animals before we put a bolt through their brains and BBQ them.

Perhaps the ultimate extension of this is to re-draw the circle and actually start to eat our pets - obviously only once they have died of natural causes and exhausted either our ability to extend their lives, or our ability to pay the vet fees. Once venous access becomes too difficult for Mr Tibbles' dialysis- then we put her down, and stick her in a stir-fry. (Alternatively, "Roadkill Ragout" would also be an ethical dish.)

This week i also read two articles in the same newspaper that i thought juxtaposed our conflicted feelings towards animals.

In one article, it was reported that neglected aboriginal childeren in northern Australia had been found roaming the desert, suckling on dogs- "The very depths of depravity" i thought. The international news section had an article about the newly discovered monument found in Rome- honouring the site where Romulus built his mud hut. "Cool" i thought- i had no negative emotions thinking about those poor little abandoned fratricidal Italian boys.

Why is the idea of a baby suckling on an animal so disgusting when we are happy to drink milk squeezed from the breast of a cow?

Humans were all originally lactose intolerant (after weaning) however the genes for metabolising lactose into adulthood evolved in us along with our domestication of the cow.

It's fascinating to think of the steps involved: big-brains -> "milking a cow" meme -> cow domestication -> human lactose tolerance (approx 4000BC). Actually, only 30% of the world's population in lactose tolerant- but the process of letting milk rot into cheese breaks up the lactose, making it digestible.

In a sense, the cow has also domesticated us, thereby assuring it's own survival.

Profiting and Pirateering in the era of aXXo

Some months ago, a guy i know gave me a bootlegged copy of the latest "Pirates of the Carribean"- it was blurry, with bad sound and you could see people moving in front of the screen. Luckily, it was such a bad film that it didn't matter. Is it still a crime if you hate the film?

When 'busted' by my spouse (who is a vehement anti-pirate) about the illegalities of bittorent etc i explained that it was OK as the producers of "POTC" were also profiting from piracy. "Think about all those poor people who have been killed by pirates! This film mocks that sad history".

Question: who is aXXo?

Note the the uppercase central X's.. cool. Who is aXXo ? He's a pirate! He's considered by those in the know as one of the most reliable DVD rippers in bittorrentland- but nobody actually knows who he is. (I can reveal he is not me if that helps).

Yes aXXo is a modern-day Robin Hood, a veritable and venerable HERO no less... for doing what exactly? Sticking a DVD into his computer and pushing a button- incredible how little it takes these days to be worshipped.

He usually rips them to fit on a CD (around 700MB) so the quality is OK- though very far short of "hi-def!". Crazy when HD-DVD/Blu-ray is out more and more people are actually watching LOWER definition downloaded stuff , or ultralow stuff from YouTube .. although this will presumably change - e.g. with Vuze setting itself up as a hi-def portal.

There are even meta-pirate aXXo rips- i.e. people who pretend to be aXXo... and now there's a guy riding his coattails called KLAXXON whose name cleverly comes up every time you search for an AXXO.

Apparently aXXo never releases stuff in RAR format. For those who don't know- this is a 'pain in the ass' format where the movie file gets chopped up into 30 little bits, which you then need to reassemble using yet another program before you can watch it.


Other pirate related trivia in this (overinclusive!) post:

1. Who is Bob?
Bob, of the "History according to Bob Podcast" had a great series on pirates through the ages- (i think he's a little obsessed) and there was a particularly fascinating one about female (cross-dressing/bisexual?) pirates including Anne Bonny... (that's one biography that reads like a hollywood script) -but unfortunately only the last 20 or so podcasts are still available. I wonder if i can upload a podcast to the blog?

2. The Explainer
I read a great article earlier this year from Slate (from a great & funny column called "The Explainer!") about the origins of "pirate talk"... turns out the "aaaarrrgh" was invented by an actor (from Dorset) who played "Long John Silver". Other columns include topics such as "Can steroids enlarge your head?", and "How to Fight Monkeys".

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (TDBATB)

I've just recently changed my homepage from igoogle to "mynytimes"... and so have been reading a lot of the New York Times online. You can add/subtract whatever bits of the paper you find interesting/boring- once again ensuring you never have to read news you might get upset by, or opinion you might disagree with. (Part of the reason i cancelled my subscription to The Guardian Weekly International Edition).

Anyway, found a great article about Julian Schabel- artist cum director who has a new film based on "The Diving bell and the Butterfly". I have 2 copies of this slender book- both in hardcover and i haven't read either. It's written by a French magazine editor who suffered a 'locked in' syndrome after a brainstem stroke that rendered him mute and immobile. He was, however able to communicate with the movement of one eye (!) - and dictated his book in this manner.


I have always dreaded being buried alive- waking up face-to-face with the cushiony quilted purple silk lining that i imagine all expensive coffins have. You know- you have to bite the tip of your finger off in order to scrawl the words " i was still ALIVE" on the fabric. Imagine the horror of being confined in your chair on an infinite airline flight in economy class - multipled by a trillion. Imagine being COMPLETELY aware of the pain, and the 'gallows humour' of the ICU team on their rounds. Believe me- i know- i've been on them- working under a 5 foot genius Intensivist with a wit to rival the great S J Perelman.

BP: And how about cardiac? Any arrythmias overnight?
Self: A short run of SVT only-
BP: Short? SHORT? Around here we don't use that word. We say "petite", we say "gamine".. we say "lithe"... but we never say "short".

the whole day went on and on like this..

I have been waiting for the right time to read one of the books-but i've never been so unbelievably happy in my life that no neurological horror story could upset me.

So, when i read this great article from NYTimes about Julian Schnabel (FOOTNOTE: Schnabel? Schnabel! .. how do you do the Blog?Shlog! yiddish put-down when the word already starts with 'sch'?) about his new film TDBATB- i thought maybe i can stand to watch the film instead- in french, with english subtitles! The photo at the top makes it look like "Weekend and Bernies" .. "He's in a locked-in state but he's the life of the party!". But i don't think i will.

Yet, i did manage to read an article about a film about the book(s) so that's something i guess. It was a very well written article- and Julian Schnabel sounds like a fascinating guy- artist, director, millionaire married to a model. What else could you wish for? Except that his art is crap.